Book One, Page Fifteen. Reunion By Funeral.
Jerry left his office by the back door just as the first customer of the day pulled up in front. Peggy would tell the man that the doctor was at a funeral. And the man would get mad. And Peggy would tell him that he should come earlier, when the waiting room was empty. And that would make the man madder still, and more likely to take his veterinary business to the big slick clinic over on Veterans Boulevard.
But this was something Jerry had to do. He drove to Metairie-Lake Lawn funeral home and parked under its large live oaks. There weren't many people there, although the visitation had been going on for an hour already.
He found Parlor C, signed the book, and stepped into a room of strangers. The few whose eyes caught his looked away in non-recognition, nodded solemnly, and moved on. Jerry drifted into the inner room. The casket lay open in there and he headed for it. But his drift was arrested by the sight of a man whose face was both familiar and shocking to behold.
It was unmistakably Robert Roquette. He was very much aged from the man in Jerry's mental photograph, taken over thirty years ago. Roquette seemed old back then to Jerry. But he proved today that he could look much older still, and did. His full head of hair was of a whiteness that glowed. He was as tall as Jerry remembered him, a fact that Jerry noticed even though Roquette was sitting down, his hand on one of those aluminum canes with four short, branching legs at the bottom. A training walker, Jerry thought.
"Mister Roquette!" Jerry said. "I haven't seen you in a million years!"
Roquette looked up. A smile spread over yellowed, long teeth. "I expect it must be that long, because I can't remember who you are!"
"I'd be surprised if you did," said Jerry. "Back in 1965 and 1966 I used to come into your drugstore every afternoon on my way home from Jesuit. I sat at the counter in my uniform and had French fries and cherry Cokes, and read comic books."
"That doesn't help me!" Roquette said, exerting himself as if he were shouting, although his voice was at the level of normal speech. "We used to have a lot of young men come in and do that."
"You had the best French fries I ever ate," Jerry continued. "I'm still looking for French fries that taste like that. I remember watching them fry. They were great! I can taste them right now!"
Roquette stared at Jerry for a long moment, then waved his finger at him. "Wait. I do remember you. You walked in on me once in the back room while I was taking a nap, didn't you?"
Few memories were more vivid to Jerry than that one, even though it hadn't crossed his mind in many years. He laughed nervously, an old transgression come back to haunt him. He'd gone back there to use the bathroom that was not supposed to exist, except that he was such a regular customer that they let him use it.
"I was hoping you wouldn't remember that," Jerry said. "I never went back there again after that. But it did give me the idea of taking a nap every day. I still do."
"It's a darn good idea," said Roquette. "How do you think I got to be eighty-two years old?"
"You don't look eighty-two," Jerry said automatically.
"That's what everybody says, and you're all full of crap. I sure feel eighty-two. Maybe even eighty-five. But not ninety." Roquette chuckled, then paused. "How did you know my little sister?"
Jerry felt a new twinge. Honoring the dead was really his secondary motivation for being here, credible though it may be. "I was Mrs. Lancaster's veterinarian," Jerry said. "The cat that she was trying to bury when she had that stroke was the one she'd just picked up from my office."
"What? You sell dead cats?" asked Roquette.
"No, no. She rolled over the cat with her car, and she brought it to me to see if I could help it. But it was already dead. She was really heartbroken about it. She said it belonged to her daughter."
"Here, sit right here," said Roquette, patting the chair next to him. Jerry sat down. Roquette paused again, as if trying to think of the right words to say. "So it was you who put the cat in a box."
"I told her we could bury the cat," Jerry said. "We do that all the time, especially for older people."
"Well, it's a hell of a reason to go," said Roquette. "She was my little sister. Fifteen years younger than me. She was a beautiful girl. I was more like her father than our father was. She used to go out with so many boys. They were always coming over. Most of them were terrible. Once there was this feller who had a big purple Mercury, the kind with the little window in the back. He made her cry one night. I went to his house and threw a bucket of yellow paint on his god-damn purple car."
Roquette stopped talking again, but longer this time. He looked out into the room. Jerry sat, uneasy. He wanted to shift the conversation back to the drugstore, and maybe bring up the fact that he wanted to lease it for his restaurant. But no opening appeared.
"And the boy she married," Roquette continued. "I thought he was bad when I first met him. Turned out he wasn't so bad after all, but. . . "
Jerry's peripheral vision alerted him to turn his head. He saw a woman walking toward him, wearing a black dress that was a bit too small for her somewhat overabundant body. She had long, brilliant red hair.
