Buttons and Bitter

I want to tell you I walked into that funeral with dignity. I did not. I walked up to it behind four llamas, holding a lead rope in each hand and one wrapped around my wrist, while a woman named Amelie tried to eat a wreath.

The friend who asked me to do this was Paula Lowe, sixty-nine years old, retired geologist, owner of Lowe's Llama Treks. She'd called me on a Tuesday. "Rani, honey, I need llamas at my funeral. Can you drive them over Saturday morning?"

Her funeral. Which she was attending. Alive. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let me back up. I'm Rani Schwartz, I'm forty-three, I make wine for a small outfit outside town, and two years ago my wife left me. Divorce papers, moving boxes, the whole ugly parade. I'd been volunteering at Paula's place on weekends mostly to have somewhere to be that wasn't my own kitchen.

So Saturday morning I hosed down four llamas, loaded them into the trailer, and drove forty minutes of dirt road to the grounds of Lowe's Llama Treks, where somebody had strung up a banner that said CELEBRATING A LIFE WELL LIVED over the corral gate. My fingers still smelled like oak from the barrels I'd scrubbed Friday night. Every time I touched my face I got a whiff of winery, which felt about right, since the whole plan I'd cooked up on the drive over had a bitter finish too.

Because I haven't said this yet. When I parked and looked through the door of the barn, which Paula had turned into a meeting hall with folding chairs and a podium draped in what I swear was a llama blanket, I saw Veronica.

My Veronica. Forty-one now, looking like a magazine, sitting in the third row next to a girl who couldn't have been older than twenty-five, wearing a black dress that cost more than my truck payment. My ex-wife. At the funeral of a woman I was pretty sure neither of us had ever met.

I stood in the doorway with llama hair on my good jacket and my heart doing something complicated, and I thought, well. If Paula Lowe is dead, then the least the dead can do is host my revenge.

I had two years of material. I'd been workshopping it in the shower. The opening line was good. "Veronica, you look lovely, I'd hate for you to catch your death before the reading of the will." Something like that. I had a whole speech about how she'd traded thirteen years for somebody who thought wine came in boxes. Thirteen years, ages twenty-eight to forty-one, gone, and I'd been rehearsing.

A llama sneezed on my shoulder and brought me back to the room.

"Are those yours?" said a voice at my elbow.

I turned. Woman, maybe thirty-eight, jeans, hiking boots, a lanyard with a visitor badge from some software company. She was looking at my llamas with what I can only call naked hope.

"They're mine for the day," I said. "Rani."

"Candi. With an I. Like the stripper spelling, my mom thought it was cute." She stuck out her hand. "Are they part of the service? Do we get to pet them? The website said something about treks."

"The website?"

"Yeah, I just got hired on as a side gig, weekends. QA tester during the week, but I sit at a desk all day and I wanted a reason to be outside. Paula interviewed me on the phone. She seemed great." Candi squatted down and held her fingers out toward Amelie. "Is this one friendly?"

"Amelie will eat your badge if you let her."

"Honestly? Fair. I'd eat my badge too if I could."

I liked her immediately, which annoyed me, because I had a speech to give and a face to keep mean. You can't rehearse a eulogy of spite while a stranger coos at your llama.

"They're here for atmosphere," I said. "Paula wanted llamas."

"For her own funeral?"

"That's what I was told."

Candi stood up and looked around the hall. "Huh. Weird that there's no casket."

I had noticed that too, in my defense. I'd just filed it under small-town eccentricity.

***

The chairs filled up. I counted maybe thirty people, and a lot of them seemed to know each other in the way people do when they haven't spoken in a decade and are both pretending otherwise. Two men in the back row sat with a whole chair of empty space between them. A woman in a green blazer kept checking her phone and putting it away.

Paula came in through the side door wearing black and moving slow, and the room hushed. I'll say this for her, she committed. She walked to the podium, put both hands on it, and looked out at us with wet eyes.

"Thank you all for coming," she said. Her voice wobbled. "It means everything, to see so many faces gathered here today, for me."

Then she looked right at the two men with the empty chair between them, and held it a beat too long, and something in my stomach went sideways.

"When I got my diagnosis," Paula continued, "the doctors gave me six months. So I started making calls. I called everyone I owed an apology to, and everyone who owed me one. Some of them hung up on me." She smiled down at the podium. "So I did the next best thing. I invited them all to the same room and I told them it was a funeral, because apparently the only event that can get this family in one zip code is somebody dying."

Nobody moved.

"Which brings us to the part where I confess I'm not dead." She spread her arms. "Surprise. The diagnosis was wrong. Turned out to be a kidney stone and a bad radiologist. But the guest list was already made, and Lord knows none of you would come to a barbecue."

The room made a sound I can only describe as a church full of people being robbed.

I turned to Candi. She was staring at the podium with her mouth open.

"Is this legal?" she whispered.

"I have no idea," I whispered back.

Then Paula's eyes found me, and she came down off the little stage and walked right up, past the folding chairs, past Veronica's row, and stood in front of me with her hand out like we were at a garden party.

"Rani, sweetpea, you came, and you brought the llamas. You're a doll."

"Paula." I kept my voice down, which took effort. "You told me you were dying. You told me this was a memorial and the family needed the llamas for tradition."

"Well, the family does love the llamas."

"You let me wash four animals and drive them here for a hoax."

"It's not a hoax, it's an intervention with folding chairs." She patted my arm. "And honey, I need to tell you something before you blow up at me, because I can see you loading up."

"Paula, I came here to do a job, and also, if I'm being plain with you, I saw my ex-wife in that third row and I had about four minutes of material ready."

"I know, sweetpea. I invited her."

I stopped. The barn got very quiet in my ears, the way it does when a wine fermentation stalls.

"You what?"

"I invited Veronica. I knew you two were, what did the vet call it, acrimoniously dissolved. And I thought, here's a woman holding a two-year grudge like it's a show dog. Time to take her to a funeral where the corpse gets up and walks around." Paula squeezed my hand. Her grip was stronger than it had any business being. "Stay for the pie. Nobody leaves before the pie. That's a rule."

Then she walked back to the podium and started in on the apologies, starting with the back row, and I stood there with llama hair on my sleeve and a dead speech in my pocket.

Candi leaned over. "So, real question. Is the pie at least good?"

"I have no idea," I said. "But I'm starting to suspect nothing else about today is either."

I lasted maybe ten more minutes of the apology portion of the program. I know because I was counting the ways Veronica could pretend not to look at me, and I needed a baseline. Around apology number four, I slipped out the back door. Nobody noticed. In my experience, that was the purpose of funerals. You could leave your own life without comment.

I went to the corral, where the four llamas were doing their best impression of animals who had not been hosed down at seven in the morning for a scam. Amelie had her nose in the feed bucket I'd left on the rail, because Amelie would eat anything, including possibly the banner itself if we left her long enough.

"You're a fraud magnet," I told her. "You know that, right? All four of you. Forty minutes of dirt road. A banner. I scrubbed barrels Friday night, Amelie. Friday night. And for what? A woman in black doing community theater."

"Are they good listeners?"

Candi came around the corner of the barn with a paper cup of coffee she'd apparently scrounged from somewhere, boots crunching on the gravel. She leaned on the rail like she'd worked here for years instead of two weekends.

"They're better than the audience in there," I said. "Amelie at least stays through the whole speech."

"Paula's still going. She's on the guy in the back row now. He cried, which was uncomfortable for everyone." She took a sip. "So I bailed. Don't tell her. She seems like the type to make a rule about it."

"She already made a pie rule. The pie rule is load-bearing in this operation."

Candi laughed at that, a real one, not a polite one, and I felt something in my chest loosen a quarter turn. Then she pointed her cup at me, casual as anything.

"Hey, so, question. And tell me if it's rude."

"It's always rude with you. Go ahead."

"Are you the ex?"

I stopped scratching Amelie's neck. "The ex what?"

"The ex everybody's been gossiping about. The tall one, the wife who left. Veronica. She's got the girl with her, the one who's about 25, and I heard two different ladies in the back talking about a wine woman and a broken marriage and somebody named Rani." She shrugged. "And you've been glaring at that row like it owes you money, so."

"I have not been glaring."

"Honey, you've been glaring since the banner. The llamas could feel it."

Amelie, traitor that she was, chose that exact moment to lip at my sleeve, and Candi took that as confirmation of something, which it wasn't, but I let it go.

"Yes," I said. "That's me. Rani Schwartz, the wine woman with the broken marriage. Thirteen years, and she walked out two years ago for a girl who could be her, well, not her daughter, but you take my point."

"Is the girl 25?"

"About. Veronica's forty-one. I'm forty-three. Do the math on how that felt."

"I'm thirty-eight and I once dated a twenty-four year old, so I can imagine how it felt, which was flattered for about a month and then deeply tired."

That surprised a laugh out of me. "That's exactly it. Except multiply by thirteen."

"So that's why you came to the fake funeral." Candi set her cup on the post. "Not for Paula. Not for the llamas. You came for her."

The honest answer was yes, and I'd been avoiding saying it out loud even to myself, so of course I said it out loud to a stranger. "Paula called me on a Tuesday and told me she was dying. I said yes before I even knew what she wanted, because she's the one person who was kind to me that first year, when I couldn't get through a Saturday. Then I saw Veronica in the third row and I thought, fine, fine, if I'm stuck at a funeral, at least I have material."

"Material."

"I had a speech. Four minutes, give or take. Tight. I'd been workshopping it in the car. There was a bit about how she never once came to the vineyard crush, not once in thirteen years, and a line about the younger model that I was pretty proud of."

Candi looked at me the way my sister looks at me when I've had half a bottle and start reordering my life. "And what was the plan? You stand up at a funeral, out-dead-pan the actual fake corpse, and then what? She cries? The twenty-five year old gasps? You feel better?"

"I feel better, yes. That's the point of revenge, it's famously for feeling better."

"Has that ever worked? For you? Or anyone you've met?"

I opened my mouth. I closed it. Amelie ate something she shouldn't have, off the ground, and I