The Embalmer's Watch

Olive here. Forty-three years old, nanny by trade, married going on ten years this autumn. My wife Kourtney is thirty-nine, and she's been an embalmer since she was twenty-two, which is a long time to spend around people who don't talk back.

The story I want to tell starts on a Tuesday in October, in the back room of a barbershop in a seaside town in Murphey. It ends much later that night, in our bed, and I'll get there. But first the ashes.

Kourtney's aunt Dot had died in August. She'd been a barber in that same shop for most of her adult life, and she'd left instructions, in writing, that her ashes were to be scattered on the floor of that back room. Not the beach, not a garden. The floor of a barbershop. Kourtney didn't blink at it. She'd known Dot her whole life, more or less.

The owner of the shop, a big man named Ravi, had known Dot too. He closed early for us, turned the sign around, and said, "Take whatever time you need," and then he left through the front and we let ourselves in the back.

So that's how it was just the two of us, standing in a room with a mop sink and a couple of folding chairs and a window that looked out on nothing but a brick wall.

Kourtney held the little cardboard box against her chest. She'd worn a black coat for the occasion, which I thought was a bit much for a back room, but that was Kourtney. She did things properly. She did everything properly. It was one of the things I loved about her, and one of the things that had started to wear on me, if I'm honest with myself, which took me a long time to admit.

"Are you ready?" she asked me.

"I'm ready."

She opened the box and tipped it, and the ashes came out grey and fine, and they spread across the linoleum in a wide soft arc. Neither of us said anything for a while. I looked at the floor and thought about Dot standing behind a chair with her scissors, telling some poor man he needed less off the top than he thought.

Then Kourtney knelt down and pressed her palm flat into the ashes, just for a second, and stood back up and wiped her hand on her coat.

"She'd have hated a church," Kourtney said. "This is right."

"I think so too."

She looked around the room. I watched her do it. She was checking, I realized later, for anything of Dot's that might still be there, a mark on the wall, something scratched into the plaster. There wasn't. It was just a room.

After that we stood there another minute and then Kourtney said we should go, and we went, out through the back and into the street, where the wind came off the water and pushed at us both.

* * *

Here is the part where I tell you about the watch, because Kourtney noticed it before I did.

Dot had left me the watch in her will. A gold-cased thing with a leather strap, older than both of us put together. She'd said, the last time we visited, that a woman who works with children ought to know what time it is at all times, and she'd said it like a joke but also not like a joke. That was Dot all over.

I'd put it on that morning without thinking much. It was loose on my wrist. I'd been meaning to get a link taken out for weeks.

We were walking toward the car, and Kourtney said, "You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

She nodded at my wrist. I had the watch face turned toward me and my thumb resting on the crown, the way I do when I'm thinking about pickup times and snack schedules and which kid needs to be where. Ten years of nannying puts habits on you like that.

"You've checked that thing four times since we left the shop," she said. "Nobody's paying you by the hour right now, love."

"I wasn't checking the time. I was just."

I stopped, because I didn't have an excuse. She was right. I'd checked it four times, standing in a room with her aunt's ashes, and I hadn't once taken her hand.

"It was hers," I said, holding my wrist up. "It's a bit big."

"It suits you," Kourtney said. "Dot always said gold on you. She said it the first Christmas I brought you home, do you remember?"

I did remember. Dot had looked me up and down at the door, said "good bones," and poured me a sherry I didn't want. I'd drunk it anyway. I'd liked her instantly.

"She also told me, that same visit, that if I ever let you slip away she'd come back and haunt me," Kourtney said. She said it lightly, but her voice caught a little at the end, and she looked out at the water instead of at me.

"You'd deserve it," I said.

"Yes, I would!"

We got in the car. She drove. I looked out the window and did not check the watch, which took real effort, and I could feel her glance at my wrist once at a red light and then look away, satisfied, like she'd won something small.

* * *

Here is the thing I have to explain about us, so the rest makes sense. We met at a karaoke bar when I was thirty and she was twenty-six. She sang something terrible and committed to it completely, and I bought her a drink, and it ended there. Married at thirty-three. Both of us working jobs that eat people. Her job eats her quietly; mine eats me loudly, with forty hours of other people's children and then my own house neglected on top.

Somewhere in the last year we had become two women who lived together efficiently. We left notes about bins. We asked about each other's days and listened to about half the answer. We had not been properly alone together in months, and I mean truly alone, no work call, no list, no reason to be anywhere.

So when Kourtney turned the car away from the main road and toward the seafront instead of home, I noticed.

"Where are we going?"

"There's a karaoke place two streets up from the chip shop. It's Tuesday, it'll be empty." She pulled into a space and put the handbrake on and then didn't move. "I don't want to go home yet. Do you?"

I thought about our kitchen, and the notes about bins, and the half-listened answers.

"No," I said. "I don't."

"Good." She turned the engine off. "Because I've had Dot's ashes in my car for a week and today I finally did the thing, and I would like a drink and a terrible song and my wife, in whatever order they come."

I laughed. It surprised me, how easy it came out.

"You can have all three," I said. "But I'm picking the first song."

"God help us both, then!"

We got out of the car. The wind had died down and the streetlights were coming on along the front, and the chip shop smelled the way it always had, vinegar and hot oil, the same as it had the night we met, which was two streets the other way and thirteen years ago. Kourtney came around the bonnet and, before we walked in, she took my hand. First time in I couldn't tell you how long, which is a shameful thing to write and a true one.

"You're still wearing the watch," she said.

"I am."

"Dot would be pleased." She squeezed my hand once. "Come on. I want a gin and I want you to sing something from before either of us was born."

Inside, the karaoke bar was exactly as empty as she'd promised. A man behind the bar with a shaved head and a tired smile, four stools, a screen nobody was using. Kourtney ordered two gins and picked a songbook off the counter and flipped through it like she was reading a menu she already knew by heart.

"Dot used to sing this one," she said, and turned the book around so I could see.

"Are you going to sing it?"

"Maybe at the end of the night," she said. "When it counts."

I picked up the pen to fill in a request slip, and my hand went to the watch first, out of pure habit, and Kourtney saw it and grinned at me over the rim of her glass, and I put my hand down flat on the bar and left it there.

I wrote a song once. Nobody knows this, not even Kourtney. It was the year after we got married, back when I was thirty-four and still thought I might be the sort of person who finishes things. I wrote it on the notes app of a phone I no longer own, and every couple of years I'd remember it existed and hum it in the shower and then forget again. It has no title. It has four verses and the fourth one doesn't rhyme because I gave up.

So when the man with the shaved head plugged in the machine and the screen woke up blue, I picked the slip back up off the bar and wrote the number of some old slow song that was on the book's filler pages, the kind nobody requests, and I put the slip in the tray and said a small prayer that the machine ran the numbers in order.

"What did you pick?" Kourtney asked.

"You'll see."

"That's ominous."

"It's a surprise. Be nice about it."

"I'm always nice about your surprises. I married you, didn't I."

The man with the tired smile read the slip, typed the number in, and raised his eyebrows at me in a way that suggested he had seen a lot of numbers and this was not one of them. The intro came on, all tinny through the little speakers, and Kourtney's face did something complicated.

"Olive," she said. "That's not on the book."

"I know. I called in a favor. Dev knows the owner." (I don't want to explain how. It involved a phone call I made weeks ago, when I'd decided I would drag her out one of these Tuesdays, and a man named Dev who owes me because I sat with his mother through four hours at the hospital once. Nannies collect favors the way other people collect receipts.)

"You called the owner of a karaoke bar," Kourtney said slowly, "to get them to add a track. Weeks ago. Before you knew we'd ever come here."

"Nine years ago I wrote you a song. Well. I wrote a song. It's about you. I never sang it because I'm not brave, and then I kept not singing it because it felt strange to sing a song that old to a woman I'd been leaving bin notes with." I picked up the spare microphone and turned it over in my hands. "And then today you scattered your aunt in a barbershop, and it turns out strange is the whole day's theme, so."

She didn't say anything. Her gin sat on the bar getting warm and she didn't touch it.

The first verse came up and I sang it. My voice did the thing my voice does, wobbled on the second line, but the bar was empty and the man with the shaved head was polite and Kourtney was looking at me like I was the last drink of the night. The second verse was better. The third was the one where the rhyme gives up, and by then I was looking at her and not the screen anyway, so it hardly mattered.

The last line is just her name, sung twice. I'd forgotten that. It came out before I was ready for it.

The track ended and the bar was very quiet and the machine's little screen said THANK YOU in bouncing letters, which undercuts everything, but there you go.

"You absolute cow," Kourtney said, and her voice was thick. "You've been sitting on that for nine years."

"Nine, exactly."

"You let me think you don't finish things."

"I don't. That's the one thing I finished."

She got up off the stool and came around