CHAPTER 1
Snow Leger, August 1999
The body resting in the coffin at the front of the empty chapel had once belonged to Mina Jean Murphy, aged fifty-five years and seven months. Wife to Burton and mother to Clarice, Reagan, and Jeb, Mina Jean was the founding member of her neighborhood’s Red Hat Society. She had been the kind of woman other women gossiped about behind her back—mostly because they were jealous and didn’t have much else to talk about, and not because Mina Jean had ever done anything more scandalous than tip the tart at Marble Slab Creamery ten percent instead of twelve. She’d possessed both the nicest car and the prettiest lawn in all the West End side of town, as well as a husband who dutifully handed over his checkbook but otherwise kept to himself.
Unfortunately, Mina Jean had also had an aggressive smoking habit. She’d sneaked her first L&M cigarette from her mother’s purse as a girl of sixteen, and all the chilled ambrosia salad and lean fish in the world couldn’t combat the cancer that had started growing in her lungs with that first inhale. Neither had the efforts of the pricey pulmonologist she’d been seeing in the city who couldn’t make heads or tails of her condition. The result of this was that Mina Jean had ended up having her hair teased around her head on a coffin pillow at Evans Funeral Parlor on Monday morning rather than brunching at the Symphony League of Southeast Texas’s ladies’ luncheon, as had been printed in her itinerary.
Snow Leger had tended Mina Jean’s hair for decades, and today was their final appointment. Ladies of a certain age, Snow’s clients had a habit of passing away with shocking regularity. Styling dead women’s hair had bothered Snow once, but she’d learned families found it easier to grieve when they recognized the body in the casket. Ensuring her clients went to their eternal resting place with their hair done up properly gave everyone a measure of comfort, Snow included.
She lifted Mina Jean’s silvery-blond bangs with her comb, then held the hair in place while she doused it with hairspray. Mina Jean had been one of her chattier clients. So far, Snow had bitten back her usual questions of How are the kids? and What’s old Burton been getting up to? no less than thirteen times.
Thirteen is such an unlucky number, Snow thought. But then I guess any number can be unlucky.
Poor Mina Jean died at only fifty-five. Snow was already forty-eight herself.
She smoothed a stray strand of wiry blond back into place and gave it another spritz, keeping the back of her warm, living hand from touching Mina Jean’s cool, dead forehead. Snow had never gotten accustomed to the way the dead felt. Frankly, she didn’t care to.
“Well, Mina Jean, dear, it’s almost time for your last party,” she said, plucking a piece of fuzz from the dead woman’s bright paisley burial dress and adjusting the set of the brooch on her chest. “All that’s left to do is get your face on.”
Aside from hair, everything from the moment the body was brought in from the morgue until it was covered up with earth was conducted in-house at Evans Funeral Parlor by the family’s elderly matriarch, Ducey Evans; her daughter, Lenore, only a few years Snow’s senior; or Lenore’s daughter, Grace, born right after they swore in JFK. It had been that way so long even Snow, who knew almost as much about everything going on in the county as had Mina Jean Murphy, couldn’t remember it ever being any different. Ducey’s mother had once run the parlor, but Pie Evans had passed so long ago that even Mina Jean hadn’t had any good gossip to hand down. The Evanses’ business was a generational one, passed from daughter to daughter.
“You’ve done up Mina Jean real nice, Snow.” Ducey Evans gave Snow’s shoulder a reassuring pat as she settled into a chair beside the casket stand, short curls damp against her cheeks. The aging matriarch popped a butterscotch candy between her lips with an audible pop, then pulled her bifocals from the bridge of her nose and tucked them into the front pocket of her blouse. “She always liked her bangs teased up like that, ever since she was a girl. Poor thing spent her entire life tryin’ to grow into her hair.”
Snow considered the ample height of Mina Jean’s bangs. “I made them extra poufy on account of the special occasion,” she said. Another stray hair had sprung loose, and Snow sealed it back down with a generous douse of hairspray. “Let me see how you’re settin’ up, Ducey, dear.”
She set her comb and the Aquafina canister down on the pew beside her beauty kit, then tugged on a pair of pink nitrile gloves as she shifted to stand behind Ducey’s chair. Snow checked the instructions on the pink and gray Fanci-Full Color Rinse bottle, glancing at the pendulum clock anchored on the chapel’s back wall.
“Oh, I’m sure it’s fine,” Ducey said, the words wet around the hard candy in her mouth. “Not much you can do to ruin hair when you’re my age.”
“Well, we don’t want it coming out blue,” Snow teased, “unless that’s what you’d prefer. And if that’s the case, I’m sure I’ve got something better than a rinse.”
The old woman flapped her wrist in dismissal, but Snow knew better. Ducey Evans might have worn a baker’s apron stained with Lord-knew-what the same way people wore a lucky shirt, but she was still a woman who looked after herself.
Lenore Evans stepped into the room, her arms laden down with a spray of lilacs, lavender cremones, and a single white rose. “Mama’s hair used to be so black it was almost blue—”
Ducey jabbed an arthritic finger toward the ceiling. “Raven black.”
“Daddy’s, too,” Lenore went on, as if she hadn’t heard her mother. She laid the flowers on top of the organ near the casket and fingered the edges of her cropped ginger bob. “He used to tease that I got my auburn hair from the milkman.”
Coming in behind her mother, Grace, the third member of the Evans family, carried a bunch of spotted lilies and a red vanity case of mortician’s makeup. She set the flowers near the spray and the case on an empty pew, watching Lenore tuck and pinch the blooms that had crumpled during transport. Once the spray was appropriately primped, Lenore stepped aside and Grace rolled up her denim shirtsleeves, then wrapped the funeral bouquet in a ribbon the same purple hue as the dead woman’s dress.
Ducey set her glasses back into place as she watched the younger Evans women work. “Royce was always fussy about his hair,” she said, turning over the candy in her mouth with her tongue as she spoke. “Man took better care of his hair than most women I ever knew, always combin’ and conditioning. When he started to go gray, he took to colorin’ it—never could stand the look of it otherwise, no matter how thin his hair got.” She chuckled. “He kept what little he had left as black as shoe polish ’til the day he died.”
Snow laughed, patting Ducey’s shoulder before she stepped away to finish packing her things. Grace set the flowers aside and moved to take her place over Mina Jean, vanity in tow.
“I remember that,” Grace said as she clicked the case open. “In fact, I remember coming in one day and finding Papa Royce in the kitchen, reading the newspaper and wearing nothing but a robe and slippers and a Lady Clairol processing cap. He was so embarrassed.” She smiled at the memory. “Started hollering for Ducey and trying to scurry out of the kitchen before the image could stick in my memory, I guess.”
“That was Daddy.” A smile fixed itself on Lenore’s face as she teased the petals of the white rose into place. “Of course, your daddy never had any hair to worry about,” she told Grace. “Jimmy came out of the womb bald and left the world the same way. Never bothered to grow hair in the years between.”
“Never bothered to grow much of anything but a big beer gut and those pretty weeds outside,” Ducey grumbled, nodding at the white rose still clutched in her daughter’s hand as Snow towel-dried her hair. “But he was a good man.”
Lenore cut her eyes at her mother as she stalked to the clock on the chapel’s back wall, pushed the key from her pocket into the keyhole, and cranked even though the weights were already tight.
“We’ve known some good men,” Grace inserted, rustling through her vanity case. She arranged cosmetic compacts and tubes, thick-bristled brushes, a pair of scissors, and foam sponges on a cloth next to Mina Jean’s obituary photo. “Papa Royce, and Daddy,” she said, “and…”
Her voice trailed off and Snow tightened her lips into a reassuring smile. The man who’d given Grace Evans a daughter hadn’t stuck around long enough to be a father, so the list was short. What had that fella’s name been? Stephen? Simon? It was just on the tip of her tongue, something with an S—
“When Jimmy died, I thought for sure you girls would sell this place,” Snow said, observing Grace as she held each of her tubes and powders up to the dead woman’s face, carefully selecting the right colors to match Mina Jean’s complexion. “I can’t imagine how much work it must be for the three of you, handling everything you do.”
The first butterscotch finished, Ducey popped another hard candy in her mouth and stood, pushing her vacated chair back to its place against the wall. “What else would we do, sit at home and play canasta?” She shook her head and shoved her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I’ve got better things to do than sit around and rot ’til somebody puts me in the ground.”
“Now, don’t go getting yourself worked up, Mama,” Lenore warned. “You remember what Dr. Hicks said about your blood pressure.” She thumbed the clock key back into her slacks pocket, eyeing a butterscotch candy wrapper that had fallen on the floor. “And about all that darn candy.”
Copyright © 2024 by Lindy Ryan
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