The First Goodbye

In loving memory of Della Mae Thatcher, who held our hands when we could not hold our grief. — The Larkspur Garden Club, October 2024

The lilies had cost forty-two dollars per stem.

Eleanor Thatcher-Voss knew this because she had ordered them herself—seventeen stems of Casablanca, arranged in a precision fan across the closed mahogany casket—because precision was the only language her body still understood how to speak. Her grandmother had loved lilies. Her grandmother had also loved the Chicago Cubs, bourbon old-fashioneds, and the particular shade of orange the maples turned along Route 14 in late October, but none of those things could be arranged in a casket spray, so. Lilies.

She checked her watch. 7:14 AM. The service began at eleven. She had four hours to ensure the parlor was immaculate, the guest registry positioned at the entrance, the folding chairs arranged with exactly eighteen inches of space between them—wide enough for grief, narrow enough for community. Della would have said something about that. Something dry and knowing, the kind of observation that landed like a pebble in still water.

Eleanor pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until she saw constellations.

Not yet.

She had work to do.

The Thatcher Family Funeral Home had stood at the corner of Birch and Harlow for sixty-three years, a white-clapboard Victorian with a wraparound porch that groaned like a living thing in the Illinois wind. Three generations of Thatchers had received the dead in its parlor, comforted the living in its kitchen, and kept the town's grief catalogued in leather-bound registries that lined the office shelves like a library of goodbyes. The whole building smelled of old wood and formaldehyde and something faintly floral—Della's doing, the lavender sachets she tucked into every drawer and windowsill.

Eleanor moved through the parlor adjusting picture frames by millimeters. Her blazer was charcoal. Her bun was immaculate. Her face was a closed door.

By eight o'clock, the coffee was brewed, the hymnals were stacked, and the guest registry was open to a fresh page. She ran her finger down the empty lines and thought about all the names that would fill them. Larkspur was a small town. Everyone had been touched by Della Thatcher in some way—a funeral arranged, a hand held, a casserole delivered to a grieving kitchen at exactly the right hour. The woman had made death bearable. She had made it decent.

And now Eleanor had to make her decent in return.

She made it as far as the embalming room.

The room was cool and sterile, tiled in white, with the stainless steel table that her grandmother had scrubbed so many times the surface had worn to a soft brush of silver. It was empty now, of course. Della's body had been prepared days ago—Eleanor had done it herself, because there was no one left to trust with something that important. She had washed her grandmother's hair. She had filed her nails. She had dressed her in the lavender blouse Della had picked out fifteen years ago and kept in the back of her closet in a garment bag labeled, in her looping cursive, For When It's Time.

Eleanor locked the door. And then the sound came out of her—a sound she had been holding behind her sternum for six days like a breath, like a scream, like a secret—and she folded over the embalming table and wept.

She wept the way she did everything: with her whole body, with a violence that shook her shoulders and wet the collar of her blazer and made a mess of her composure. She gripped the table's edge and cried until her ribs aaked and her throat was raw, and when it was over she stood in the silence and stared at her own reflection in the chrome and saw a woman who looked exactly like her mother.

She straightened. She fixed her bun. She reapplied her lipstick in the small mirror hanging by the door—a mirror Della had placed there decades ago with a note taped to the frame that read: Check your face before you face their grief.

She checked her face.

It held.

—

Margot arrived at nine-thirty, smelling like an airport bar and Chanel No. 5.

She came through the back door—the kitchen entrance, because Margot had always come through back doors, always entered from the margins—and dropped her overnight bag on the counter next to the coffeemaker with the particular energy of a woman who had not slept and was prepared to be defensive about it.

"Don't," she said, before Eleanor could speak. "Whatever you're about to say about the time, don't."

"I was going to say the parking lot needs to be cleared by ten for the floral delivery," Eleanor said. "But since you mention it, it's nine-thirty, and you look like you slept in your clothes."

"I slept on a plane. Same thing."

It wasn't the same thing. Margot's silk blouse was buttoned wrong—one side sat higher than the other, pulling at the collar—and her auburn curls, that wild inheritance from their mother, looked as though they'd been fought into submission and lost. She poured coffee with hands that weren't quite steady and drank it black, standing, the way someone drinks when they need the caffeine to survive rather than enjoy it.

"The casket looks beautiful," Margot said quietly. It was the first genuine thing she'd said, and it caught Eleanor off guard.

"She would have hated it."

"She would have hated all of it. She would have said we were making a fuss." Margot's gap-toothed smile flickered and died. "She did say that. Last time I visited, she told me she wanted to be buried in the backyard under the oak tree with no ceremony and a bottle of bourbon."

"That's not legal in Illinois."

"Since when do you care about legal, Ellie? You embalmed her yourself in a room that hasn't passed state inspection since 2019."

Eleanor's jaw tightened. "The room is fine."

"The room is fine. Right." Margot set down her mug. "God, it smells the same in here. Lavender and—what is that, formaldehyde?"

"Lilies."

"Lilies. Right." Margot blinked rapidly and turned toward the window. "Is Callie here yet?"

"Not yet."

The name hung between them like a held breath.

—

Callie arrived at ten-fifteen, coming up the porch steps like a ghost drifting in from the cold.

She looked thinner than Eleanor remembered—ethereal in layered linen and a frayed shawl, her long locs pulled back with a piece of twine, her leather journal tucked under one arm like a talisman. Her flight had come from Portland, where she'd been photographing abandoned homesteads in the high desert, but she might as well have been coming from another century. She moved through the world as though she were only partially in it.

"Eleanor." She stood in the doorway, her brown eyes wide and searching. "Margot."

"Hey, stranger." Margot's voice was rough.

Callie crossed the kitchen and embraced them both—one arm around each sister—and for a moment the three of them stood in the kitchen where they'd eaten cereal before school, where Della had taught them to roll cookie dough, where their mother had once sat at the table and smoked a cigarette and said nothing at all, and the room held them the way rooms hold the living: imperfectly, with creaking joints.

"How was she?" Callie asked. "At the end. Was she—"

"She was comfortable," Eleanor said.

"Was she alone?"

The question was a blade wrapped in gauze. Eleanor felt it slide between her ribs with surgical precision.

"Samuel was with her," she said. "He was with her at the end."

It was true. It was the kind of truth that left room for other truths to hide behind.

Callie nodded slowly, the way she nodded at everything—as though she were listening not just to the words but to the architecture beneath them. "I tried to call her the week before. The phone just rang and rang. Did she—was she talking to anyone? Near the end, was she..."

She trailed off, circling.

"She was tired," Eleanor said. "She was ready."

Another truth. Another hiding place.

—

The graveside service was held at Larkspur Memorial Park under a sky the color of wet slate. The maples along the cemetery fence burned copper and crimson against the gray, and the air smelled of turned earth and coming rain. Two hundred people stood among the headstones—most of Larkspur, Eleanor thought grimly, and most of them crying.

Samuel Okonkwo stood at the back, broad and still as a barn in his flannel shirt, his work boots planted in the grass, his large hands clasped in front of him. He caught Eleanor's eye across the crowd and gave her a nod—a single, measured inclination that said everything his rich baritone could not have said without breaking. She returned it. They had not spoken about Della's last hours. They had not spoken about the thing Della had whispered to him in the dark. There would be time. There would have to be.

Eleanor stood at the graveside and read the twenty-third Psalm without inflection, the way her grandmother had taught her. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. She did not want. She had never allowed herself to want. Wanting was a luxury for people who hadn't been left behind.

Callie stood to her left, journal pressed against her chest, tears falling without sound. Margot stood to her right, jaw locked, hands shoved deep in the pockets of a coat that cost more than Eleanor's car payment.

The service ended. The crowd murmured, shifted, began to move toward the reception line. And that was when Ruth Anne Covington appeared.

She materialized the way she always did—immaculate in powder-blue, her silver hair swept into a chignon, her pearl earrings catching the weak October light. She wore grief the way she wore everything else: as an accessory, curated for maximum effect. Her blue eyes swept the gathering with the precision of a field marshal surveying a battlefield.

"Eleanor." She placed a cool hand on Eleanor's arm. Her smile was warm and false as a gas log. "I'm so sorry, dear. Your grandmother was a treasure to this community."

"Thank you, Mrs. Covington. She would have appreciated your being here."

She wouldn't have. Della Thatcher had despised Ruth Anne Covington with a quiet, immovable contempt that Eleanor had never fully understood—a hatred that ran too deep and too old to be about neighborhood politics.

"Such a shame about the funeral home, though." Ruth Anne's grip tightened a fraction. "I know Della had been in discussions about selling the property before she passed. I just want you to know, dear, that my offer still stands. A fair price. You won't have to worry about a thing."

The words landed like a hand around Eleanor's throat.

Discussions. Selling. Offer.

Her grandmother had never discussed selling. Her grandmother had never wavered. The funeral home was the Thatcher legacy, the family's purpose, the only thing that had held them together when everything else fell apart. Della would sooner have been buried in the backyard.

"I appreciate your concern," Eleanor said, and her voice was a scalpel, "but there must be some misunderstanding. The funeral home isn't for sale."

Ruth Anne's smile didn't waver. "Of course, dear. Think about it. You've had a difficult day." She released Eleanor's arm and moved away through the crowd, trailing sympathy like perfume.

Eleanor's hands were shaking.

—

The reading of the will was scheduled for four o'clock in the funeral home's office, a small paneled room with bookshelves that reached the ceiling and a desk that had belonged to three generations of Thatchers. The family attorney, Howard Pym—a bald, soft-spoken man who had been handling Thatcher business since before Eleanor was born—sat behind the desk with a manila folder and an expression of deep discomfort.

The three sisters sat across from him in chairs that had been there since childhood. Margot bounced her knee. Callie held her journal. Eleanor sat perfectly still.

"I'll get right to it," Howard said, clearing his throat. "Della's will is straightforward. She left the house, the property, and the funeral home business jointly and equally to all three of her granddaughters."

Margot's knee stopped bouncing.

"Equally," Eleanor repeated.

"Equal ownership. Equal responsibility. One-third share each." Howard adjusted his glasses. "There are some additional provisions regarding maintenance and operating budgets, but the core of it is simple. She wanted the three of you to have it together."

Together. The word sat in the room like a lit fuse.

"However," Howard continued, and his discomfort deepened into something that looked almost like dread, "there's an additional document. A letter, sealed, with instructions."

He withdrew from the folder a cream-colored envelope, yellowed slightly at the edges, sealed with wax. Della's handwriting marched across the front in her familiar looping cursive:

Do not open until you've read the journals in the embalming room closet.

The room went silent.

Eleanor stared at the words. Her heart had begun to pound with a slow, heavy rhythm that she felt in her teeth. The embalming room closet. The one she'd cleaned out herself. The one that had held nothing but old chemical supplies and a box of her grandfather's records.

She was wrong about that. She realized it now with a certainty that tasted like metal.

"What journals?" Callie whispered.

"I don't know," Howard said quietly. "She gave me this envelope six months ago with instructions to include it with the will. She didn't explain. She only said—" He paused, removing his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. "She only said that you'd understand when you found them."

Margot laughed—a short, brittle sound that cracked in the middle. "Of course she did. Of course she left us a scavenger hunt. Because why would she just tell us anything?"

"Margot," Callie said softly.

"No, I mean it. This is classic Della. This is—she's been gone for a week and she's still running this family from the grave."

Eleanor reached across the desk and took the envelope. The wax seal was stamped with the Thatcher family crest—a dove with an olive branch, the emblem that hung above the funeral home's front door. She ran her thumb along the seal's edge and felt the weight of whatever was inside press against her skin like a bruise.

She thought of the embalming room. The cool tile. The steel table. The mirror on the wall and its relentless instruction: Check your face before you face their grief.

She thought of her grandmother's last words, whispered in a voice thin as paper: There are things in this house I should have shown you, Eleanor. I was waiting for the right time. I was always waiting for the right time.

She had thought Della meant the funeral home's financial records. She had thought it was logistics.

She held the sealed letter in her hands and understood, with a dread that settled into her bones like winter, that it was not.