LOST AND FOUND
“Lauren, you must be joking,” Dallas said. “You can’t let Frannie simply exit with no fanfare. We need something, her friends, me, and you, most of all. Good god, she’s your mother. Nothing church-y, okay, but a wake is bare minimum essential.”
Dallas, my mother’s oldest, dearest, and gayest friend, was a force of nature, so three weeks later I waited at Frannie’s condo on West 81st for him to arrive with the food trays. Dallas invited their co-workers from Holiday Heaven Travel Advisors, where Frannie had worked for twenty-some years, in the cubicle she shared with him, and I’d invited those whose names I found in her lizard address book: masseuse, personal trainer, dermatologist, podiatrist, manicurist, who was not the same as her pedicurist, whom I also invited, hair stylist, esthetician, etc. My roommate Constance and her current scowling not-paying-his-share boyfriend begged off.
The guests were to arrive in a half hour.
I stood in front Frannie’s gold-framed hall mirror. Where’s the blonde hair that needs some fluffing? Those doll-blue eyes ringed with mascara? The too-bright pink lipstick that needs to be licked off those expensive veneered teeth? No more Frannie, mirror. You got me. Nice enough. Nothing special. Brown eyes. Brown hair, cut short, ends tucked behind my ears. No earrings. No makeup. “Like a goddamn Mennonite,” as Frannie would say.
I put away her vacuum and placed the bronze urn with her ashes among the profusion of orchids by the one window that offered a sliver view of Central Park. The tacky urn would appall her. I was sorry about that. I was sorry this wake would seem humiliatingly inadequate to her. The Tavern on the Green would have been her choice. And I was sorry about the indignity of her death. Frannie had tripped down the stairs to the 59th Street/Columbus Circle subway station wearing four-inch high, red patent leather, pointy-toed, sling-back Jimmy Choos. Broke her neck. She was fifty-two-years-old. “Forever young” was her theme song. What her vanity got her was a bunch of pervs looking up her skirt before the paramedics arrived. If she’d lived, that would have killed her.
On the plus side, Frannie would never grow old. On the minus side, I was alone in the world at thirty, an orphan.
Dad died of a brain aneurism/traffic accident on the Garden State Parkway when I was six. Mom sold our Colonial four square in Tenafly, bought this condo, went blonde, got her job at Holiday Heaven Travel, and insisted from then on that I call her Frannie. No more “Mom.” Thanksgiving dinner at a Chinese joint and Christmas bingeing on old Meg Ryan movies with take-out, like “girlfriends.” I had no living uncles, no aunts, and no cousins. “Who needs them,” as Frannie would say.
Her doorbell rang and I let Dallas in. Even juggling the stack of boxed trays, he looked like an aging dress-shirt model, graying hair sleekly cut, cheeks rosy and burnished, as if he’d just enjoyed a hot shave with a straight-edged razor. Frannie gave me that detail, the straight-edged razor, implying that this should tell me a lot. I hadn’t asked for clarification.
After we set out the trays, he handed me a glass of Prosecco, my choice, fewer bubbles than Champagne, more funereal, and said, “Maybe you could grab a scarf or a jacket from your mother’s closet to dress up your outfit.”
My “outfit” was a white shirt and black skirt. I thought I looked nice. “This is bad enough, Dallas, without you channeling Frannie.”
“It doesn’t matter. Everyone will think you’re in mourning.”
Then everyone will be wrong, I thought.
When the doorman called up. Dallas retreated to fuss over the buffet table, while I waited at the door to let in Frannie’s friends, who arrived in packs of two and threes, mostly women.
“Terrible loss.”
“If I can help in any way …”
“Such a nice apartment.”
“She was one of a kind.”
A blur of air kisses and moist hands gripping mine.
“This shouldn’t have happened.”
“I can’t believe she’s gone.”
A fat man in a rumpled suit gave me his card. Fine leather goods, wholesale. A pregnant Indian woman held my hands and sing-songed something. I got away and refilled my glass.
“She was a lovely woman.”
“And what great taste.”
A grandmotherly woman patted my arm. “Death comes to us all, dear.”
What was I supposed to say? “Thank you,” I muttered, emptying my glass, then refilled it.
Want to know what happens? Pick up a copy of Lynn Sloan‘s This Far Isn’t Far Enough at your favorite indie bookstore or order it HERE.
Lynn Sloan is a writer and a photographer. Her novel Midstream (Fomite, 2022) was called “luminous” by Foreword Reviews and her Principles of Navigation was chosen for Chicago Book Review’s Best Books of 2015. She is the author of the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough. Fortune Cookies, her flash fiction using fortune cookie fortunes, was produced as an art book by Lark Sparrow Press in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshare and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work can be found at www.LynnSloan.com