Chapter 1
Gerry Williams’s funeral was a shit show.
Before it even began, deciding who would eulogize Gerry, the beloved eighty-two-year-old patriarch of one of Eulalia, Georgia’s oldest families, proved difficult. Ellen, Gerry’s wife of sixty years that past November, hoped their middle child and older daughter, Wilma, would do it, but Wilma wasn’t one for attention, and felt that taking the task could be interpreted as her claiming to be closest with her father (which she wasn’t, necessarily) or smarter than her siblings (which she definitely was). Her older brother, also named Gerald but nicknamed Gerry Junior and called, however inaccurately, JJ by everyone who knew him—and even those who didn’t but were fans of Keep It Up, his afternoon sports radio show on 97.7 The Jam—felt like he shoulddo it, but had private concerns he would get visibly emotional in front of the crowd, and that certainly wouldn’t do. According to JJ, he was now the “man of the family,” which made every Williams except for Ellen roll their eyes. Gerry and Ellen’s thirdborn, Carol Anne, was completely out of the question for more reasons than can be listed, but chief among them: she was usually under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol; Gerry’s lifelong marriage could not be detangled from his identity, and Carol Anne had already been married four times (though her parents only knew of three); and she couldn’t go more than five minutes without mentioning her acting career, which didn’t really exist.
Which left the grandchildren. Delia, Wilma’s younger daughter at twenty-seven, had a disqualifying romantic situation or, more specifically, a complete lack thereof. Her boyfriend of four years had just dumped her, and she had barely talked about anything else since. And no one, herself included, wanted Gerry’s eulogy to devolve into a speculation of whether her ex, Connor, had cheated (there were signs, but no proof). Wilma had raised Delia and her older sister, Alice, in Atlanta, and both had moved to New York City after graduating college. Though, unlike Alice, this left Delia with a disdain for Eulalia she was unable to hide, and all wanted to avoid the eulogy becoming a rant about how sexist the “Welcome to Eulalia” billboard was (a smiling blonde woman standing in a kitchen, wearing an apron, holding a pie) or about how the Chick-fil-A playground was listed as a “tourist attraction” on the bulletin board downtown.
Alice, the oldest grandchild, seemed like a decent option: she was widely considered to be the smartest in the family because she was a writer and had even had a book published. She loved her grandfather deeply and could have remained poised throughout, but there was no way his eulogy could exclude significant heaven talk, and Alice was decidedly and openly not religious, a fact which kept her grandmother up at night.
Gerald III, JJ’s second kid, called Red for his carrot top, was chief contender. He worked at a youth ministry in Nashville, so he was used to public speaking and invoking Jesus without irony. But the pressure here was too much, and Red’s chronic fear of disappointing others and his resulting anxiety rendered him ineligible.
Carol Anne had no children, so that left Grant, JJ’s older son. Grant was the only family member who actually wanted to do it, and also the clearest nonoption. While he was affable, charming, and a dutiful grandson, most things he did in life were in an attempt to bed women or grow his client base (he was a personal trainer; these two goals often overlapped), and there was worry that his grandfather’s funeral would be no exception. He tried to make the case for himself to JJ and his mother, Jennifer, JJ’s wife of thirty years, arguing that a lot of the people at the funeral would want to hear from him anyway, given that Grant was currently living out his fifteen minutes of fame hot off a season of The Bachelorette. The episode in which he was eliminated had just aired, so he felt he had the sympathy of the nation on his side, with an uptick of 120,000 Instagram followers to prove it.
(The only person who was truly saddened by Grant’s nationally televised elimination was his aunt Carol Anne, as Grant was sent home when the remaining five contestants became four. Had he made it to the top four, he and his family would have been featured on the hometown-date episode. Carol Anne had preemptively bought a plane ticket from LAX to Georgia the moment she realized it was possible she could be featured on television, plotting to pull Grant aside and engage in a long, tearful conversation about how she could tell he had found the one in Lindsay, the twenty-three-year-old “Outfit Planner.” Her agent’s phone would surely be flooded with calls once America saw her on-screen gravitas.)
It was decided that Fred Clark would deliver the eulogy. Fred was Gerry’s lifelong best friend and business partner. He was a pseudo uncle and great-uncle to the rest of the family and would be the next best thing to actual kin speaking at the funeral. When JJ called to ask Fred if he would do it, Fred didn’t speak for a good minute. JJ thought maybe he ought to repeat himself, before Fred replied, in a crackly voice wet with tears, that he would be honored. Ellen was humbled by Fred’s agreeing. Even though she was pretty sure nothing could beat the numbness she had felt since the first night in over sixty years she’d lain down to go to bed without Gerry beside her, she knew it was no cakewalk to lose a best friend, either. Linda, Fred’s wife, had been Ellen’s closest friend (by association but also by genuine connection). She had died of breast cancer ten years earlier, and that loss had hit Ellen much harder than any member of her family cared to realize.
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