Ambrose knew better than to fall asleep on the chaise lounge next to the pool as long as his father, Jerry, a notorious practical joker, still had a couple of cherry bombs and a rocket left over from the 4th of July. But the sun was so warm, and he was so tired after mowing the yard that morning….
The explosion woke him with a violent start and he sat bolt upright, sending his sunglasses to the pavement. As soon as he realized where he was, he turned toward the sound and saw his dad sprawled across a corner of the forsythia bush, his right hand smoking. As his weight slowly bent the limbs to the ground, a stream of blood shot out of a wound on his neck, pulsing with his heartbeat.
The face of Ambrose’s mother appeared in the kitchen window, disappeared. A second later she came racing through the kitchen door. “Call 9-1-1!” she shouted to Ambrose as she reached Jerry, ripped off her blouse and pressed it against his neck.
Ambrose jumped up, fumbled the phone out of his pocket and, fingers trembling, punched the number.
Although the squad made it to the house within five minutes of his call, it was too late for Jerry. He’d played his last practical joke.
+ + +
“It wasn’t your fault. Some people might say my brother was tempting fate,” Ambrose’s uncle Blair, riding shotgun, said to him the next day as they were driving to the funeral home to make arrangements. “He must have set off a boxcar’s worth of fireworks over the years. Who could have imagined a little rocket could cut his throat?”
“Could we just not talk about it for a few minutes?” their mother, Beth, said.
“No problem,” Blair replied, a bit snippy. He rolled his shoulders into the seat and leaned his head back. Within five minutes, he began to snore.
Uncle Blair wouldn’t have dared to sleep like that, Ambrose thought, if Dad was still around. The master of the felt-tip marker moustache.
He’d unknowingly worn one of his dad’s moustaches to school in the third grade, the morning after he’d invaded his parents’ bed for the last time to hide from a persistent nightmare. Despite the ridicule, Ambrose had been disappointed when his teacher sent him to the school nurse to have it scrubbed off.
He smiled at the memory until he caught his mother’s glare in the rearview mirror.
His dad would have hated the zone of gloom his death had created, so Ambrose was determined to honor him by finding what humor he could in the situation. Anything to wipe away the memory of the previous day.
He just hoped his mom wouldn’t do a pocket check before they entered the funeral home; he’d brought along a hand buzzer, a fake winning lottery ticket, a bag of rubber cockroaches, and, under his shirt, Dad’s old favorite, the arrow-through-the-head gag. For the casket, he’d brought one of the “I ♥ Gay Porn” bumper stickers his dad loved to slap on friends’ cars.
He hoped to slip at least a couple of his dad’s favorite gags into the casket. Wherever he was headed, Ambrose was sure he could make good use of the stuff.
His sister Hannah was staring out the window. Ambrose felt sorry for her. Although she was two years older, 16 to his 14, Dad had rarely played any practical jokes on her. He once told Ambrose that she’d been born without a funny bone. Until he was in fourth grade, he had assumed that was a real diagnosis.
They pulled up to the funeral home, a rambling one-story with cheap aluminum lap siding. Take away the beds of petunias and rose bushes, Ambrose thought, and the place would look like a huddle of FEMA trailers. While his parents weren’t rich, his dad’s job as a suit salesman had paid enough to keep them solidly middle class. Surely they could afford better than this.
The interior struck him the same way; thick maroon carpet, cream and raspberry fleur-de-lis damask wallpaper and crown molding outlining the ceiling, undercut by the faux-leather furniture and the smell of bleach and roses.
A five-foot-high portrait of Caucasian Jesus, as his dad had termed the familiar portrait, in his “Is it raining?” pose, dominated the entry hall.
Ambrose poked Hannah with his elbow, nodded toward the picture. “If Dad was alive,” he whispered, “he’d have introduced us as the Goldbergs. Know what I mean?”
“Don’t be such a putz,” she said.
A portly man in a dark grey suit and glossy shoes was bearing down on them from the rear of the building, face awash with sympathy. His footsteps made no sound on the thick plush of the carpet.
“This could be the nicest place Jerry ever spent the night,” Blair said, nudging Beth to make sure she got the joke.
“Now’s not the time,” she said, tight-lipped.
His father had once told Ambrose that Uncle Blair bitterly envied him his comedic gift.
“You have a gift?” Ambrose had replied.
His father laughed. “Or a curse. Know what I mean?”
“Mrs. Reed,” the funeral director said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” He put out his hand, which she took lightly and pumped only once.
They stood restlessly as Mrs. Reed picked out a casket (the Cosmopolitan model), selected the room (the Elysian), outlined the obituary, and arranged for the service: a few dozen folding chairs, flower stands, a sign-in stand, a printed commemorative handout, and a video player running a looped video that the home would create from Mrs. Reed’s photo albums. The Red package, as opposed to the Blue or White packages.
“No polka-dot package?” Ambrose said to Hannah. “Dad would be so disappointed.”
“Maybe the red package comes with a rubber nose,” she replied softly.
Ambrose wished he’d thought to bring one.
To his disappointment, though, they didn’t have access to the casket. “We’re still working on your father,” the funeral director explained. “Getting him to look just right for you.”
Ambrose had no idea what Jerry would have deemed ‘just right.’ But he was sure it would have included a squirting flower boutonnière.
+ + +
With Uncle Blair already in town for the funeral, Ambrose was relegated to sleeping on a futon in the laundry room. As he descended the steps to the basement that evening, he heard the sound of the old television in the basement storage corner where Jerry had set up the weight kit he never touched again.
Hannah was lying on the weight bench watching cartoons.
“Studying for the S.A.T.?” he said.
“Remember Dad used to make us watch Roadrunner cartoons with him? Most parents force their kids to watch presidential speeches.”
“Lucky us.”
“You really mean that, don’t you?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Mom showed me the will earlier tonight.”
“I didn’t know Dad had a will.”
“Oh yeah. The house was his, since he inherited it from Grandpa just before they got married.”
“What about Mom?”
“Remember how paranoid Grandpa got towards the end? He made Dad promise to protect the house with a pre-nup, where Mom waived any ownership of the house if Dad passed first. She gets to live here as long as she wants. But after she moves away or passes, it goes to either you or me.”
“Which one of us?”
“That depends. It goes to the one whose life sucks the most. Dad wrote this dumbass formula into the will; points for marriages, kids, degrees, income, deductions for divorces, health problems, low income, jail time, addictions.”
“No shit?” Ambrose thought for a moment. “Don’t worry. I’ll split everything with you anyway. That’s only fair.”
“Why are you so sure your life will to suck more than mine? I grew up here too; maybe I’m already tragically warped. In twenty years I could be a crack-smoking whore with four brats and wrinkled tattoos.”
“Not a chance. Your genes come from Mom’s side of the family. Maybe that’s why Dad gave me so much more attention.”
“Attention? Yeah, like how he was always introducing you as ‘Loin fruit’ to his buddies?”
“The man had a sense of humor.”
“Making jokes at your son’s expense isn’t parenting, ’Brose. It’s messed up.”
Ambrose snorted. “I’m not going to listen to you rag on him. He’s only been dead a day.”
“So what’s the moratorium on truth-speaking? A week? A year? How long do you plan to keep living in cartoonland?”
“Cartoonland?”
“Yeah, you know. Like the coyote. Where you can run off a cliff and stand there in midair until you notice there’s no ground under your feet.”
“I can live there long enough to win the house, I expect.”
She shook her head. “It’s a booby prize, you boob. You’re not supposed to want to win it.”
+ + +
Jerry’s side of the family believed any occasion, joyful or sorrowful, demanded a bowl of spiked punch. By mid-evening, many of the family and friends had stopped by bearing hams and hankies. Those that stayed were in a loquacious state of mind.
Ambrose was eavesdropping from the organ bench in the living room, partially concealed by the elephantine leaves of Mom’s dieffenbachia. To his disappointment, only a portion of the conversations he could overhear dealt with his father. Several concerned the prank that had made Jerry briefly famous in town.
He’d set up a card table in the hardware store owned by a buddy of his and manned it every evening for three weeks, gathering enough signatures to put Boister Reed on the local ballot for councilman.
Boister was their dog, a dachshund with crooked teeth and a bladder problem. She’d passed away before Jerry could get her campaign rolling. He’d felt personally betrayed by her.
“…mean-spirited,” he heard one white-haired, shrimp-spined woman say to one of Ambrose’s second cousins.
“He was a terror with that BB gun his daddy bought him for his 10th birthday,” the cousin replied. “I probably still have a couple of his pellets in my butt.”
“He strung poor Margaret Apple along for almost all of their senior year,” another friend of Beth’s told one of the neighbors.
“Then,” the woman continued, “come time for the prom, he asked Beth instead. And instead of leaving bad enough alone, he paid Moose Palmer to ask out Margaret. Like she’d go out with somebody with one leg.”
+ + +
That evening, his mom called him into the master bedroom.
He sighed heavily, turned off the Wii and trudged up the stairs. “What?” he said.
His mother had her back to him, facing an open closet where his dad’s clothes hung neatly. Jerry’s job at the haberdashery had demanded he dress well, and the closet was overflowing with expensive suits and shirts.
“The last time you wore your good suit it didn’t even reach your wrists,” she said. “You’ll want to look sharp for the funeral.”
“I will?” Looking sharp was about a far from his concern as he could imagine.
“Your father made a point of being the best-dressed man in any crowd. He’d expect the same of you.” She still hadn’t turned to look at him.
“Whatever,” he said, watching the side of her face in the mirror over the dresser. Her eyes were puffy.
He’d never been able to match his father’s meticulous dress with his sense of humor; wouldn’t a joker like Jerry have seen the absurdity of his clothes when he looked in the mirror? And how did he sell $3,000 suits with a straight face?
His mother reached into the closet and pulled out a charcoal herringbone three-button suit. “The way you’ve grown, you and your dad were probably about the same size. Try this on.”
“This is creepy,” he said as he took the suit from her. He started to drop his drawers, but suddenly felt a new awkwardness about undressing in front of his mother, so he stepped back into the bathroom and closed the door.
He could smell his father on the suit as he pulled the coat on, a hint of cedar from the Versace Man Eau Fraiche cologne that the store’s owner had given salesmen for Christmas every year, as “part of the branding initiative.”
The trousers were the right length but a little slack in the rump. The jacket fit like it had been tailored for him. Reluctantly, he walked back into the bedroom.
His mother had pulled the rest of Jerry’s two-week suit rotation out of the closet and piled them on the bed.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Making space. Your dad always took two-thirds of the closet. Now turn around for me.”
Ambrose spun once.
“That’ll do. Now let’s find you a shirt and some shoes.”
To Ambrose’s dismay, the first shirt and first pair of black cordovans fit perfectly.
“Go get one of the ties your grandmother gave you,” she said. “We might as well do this now so you’ll know what to wear to the funeral.”
He slouched down the hall to his room, grabbed the latest Christmas-present tie, a muted maroon windowpane pattern, and carried it back to the bedroom.
His mother stopped him with a palm to his chest. After turning up his collar, she looped the tie over and deftly spun a Wellesley knot.
He turned to the dresser mirror to find a young version of his father looking back at him. The illusion pissed him off.
+ + +
After Hannah played “Clair De Lune” on her stereo for the fourth time in a row that evening, Ambrose paused his video game, crossed the hall and tapped on her door. It swung open a few inches.
His sister was sitting on the floor with her back against her bed mattress. On the floor in front of her was a tarot deck with four cards dealt in a diamond pattern. At her elbow, an almost-empty bottle of Boone’s Farm Country Kwencher wine.
“You OK?” he said.
She gave him a lopsided smile. “’Sup, half-orphan?”
“You, apparently,” he said, stepping into the room and taking a seat at her study desk. “Are you drunk?”
“I asked Dad.” She pointed at the tarot cards. “He doesn’t mind.”
“Where’d you get the wine?”
“It’s a pity bottle from Andrea and Epsilon.” Her best wild-side friends.
“Can I have some?”
“Not hardly. You’re a minor.”
“You’re only 16,” he replied. “You’re a minor, too.”
“Yeah, but you’re like a minor minor.” She giggled.
“I’m the man of the house now, right?”
She gave him the finger. “You been listening to Uncle Blair? He hasn’t got a clue. Mom’s the man of this house. Always has been. Dad was too busy clowning around.”
“That’s not fair,” Ambrose said. “He worked hard too. I don’t think he much liked hustling suits, but he kept at it.”
Hannah picked up the bottle, took a deep breath, and chugged what was left. Although the room was cool, circles of perspiration were spreading under her arms.
She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “He kept doing it because he was too much of a loser to open his own store.”
“The man’s dead. Cut him some slack.” Ambrose propped his feet up on the bed and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. “Nobody said you had to laugh at his gags, but you always did.”
“Guilty,” she said. “Just pathetic attempts to get me some parental affection.”
“He kind of ignored you, didn’t he? Compared to me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I heard him tell Uncle Blair once that Mom must have been having an affair with an undertaker when she got pregnant with you, because you’d been born without a funny bone.”
“He never said that. I was his best audience.”
Hannah’s eyes were drooping. “Why would I lie? You’ve got to laugh about it, because the moment you start trying to take him seriously you have to conclude that he was pathetic.”
“He really said that about me?”
Instead of answering, his sister waved a dismissive hand in his direction, reached over to the CD player, scrolled down to “Claire De Lune,” hit play and closed her eyes.
+ + +
Ambrose hid on the side porch the next morning to escape the expected visit from the pastor of the church they attended occasionally. Unfortunately, when their next-door neighbor, Mr. Patel, spotted him, he put down his pruning shears and crossed the lawn to where Ambrose sat.
“Hi,” Ambrose said politely, taking out his ear buds. Mr. Patel used to pay him to shovel his sidewalk, even when Ambrose did what his father termed a half-assed job of it, so Ambrose thought well of him.
Patel wiped his forehead with a railroad bandana. “I heard about your dad.”
“Yeah. We’re burying him tomorrow.”
“I won’t be there; you know why. But I am sorry. For you and your sister and your mom.”
Visitors had been sloughing off emotions around him ever since his father’s death, and the atmosphere had left Ambrose feeling reckless, so he said, “Actually, I never knew why you wouldn’t speak to Dad.”
“He never told you? Well, one Christmas my brother-in-law, who is a real a-hole, by the way, parked with his rear wheels on your lawn and left a big rut. I offered to fix it, but your Dad hired a lawn service to till up and replant half of his front yard, then sent me the bill.” Patel paused for a moment, staring out at the front yard as if he could still see the rut. “I told him to stick it. He took me to small claims court and the judge ruled in my favor.”
“The man loved his grass,” Ambrose said, remembered the paddling he’d received the one time he’d dared play wiffle ball on the front lawn.
“Sometime that winter, he must have sneaked into my garage, emptied out my bottle of liquid fertilizer and refilled it with Roundup. When my wife sprayed in the spring it wiped out over a thousand dollars worth of shrubs and flowers. Now you know.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Damn straight. Some people think your Dad was a practical joker, but that all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? Some might have called him a royal prick. Still, he loved you and your sister, so that’s something.”
“Thanks,” Ambrose said. “And thanks for the snow-shoveling gig.”
Patel shrugged. “Neighbors, right? You try to get along.”
+ + +
At ten p.m. that evening the phone finally quit ringing. Hannah retreated to her room, leaving Ambrose and his mother in the den watching an N.C.I.S. rerun. She looked exhausted.
“Mr. Patel told me what Dad did to him,” Ambrose said.
Beth sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “That was so stupid. The two of them acting like five-year-olds.”
“Why was Dad so mean?”
“Mean? He was many things, but mean wasn’t one of them. Misguided, maybe.”
“Did you think he was funny?”
She pointed with her thumb to one of the many family photos that covered the wall behind her. In it, the camera had caught her, still in her twenties, with her head back, shoulders too, mouth open so wide in laughter that Ambrose could count her teeth. Jerry had his back to the camera, but the donkey puppet on his left hand was visible.
“He had his moments,” she said. “I suppose if you measured the amount of time he put into his jokes, it wasn’t much of a payback.”
“But he never played a prank on you.”
“No, except maybe when he said ‘I do.'”
“That’s harsh,” Ambrose said.
She sighed. “I take it back. But he kept me hopping, trying to head off his little jokes. Like when he wanted to give you the middle name Mayzin.”
“Huh?”
“A. Mayzin Reed,” she said.
“What a disaster than would have been,” Ambrose said.
“A. Men.”
The name thing disturbed him that night as he tried to fall asleep. A tag like “Amazing” would have haunted him like a second head through his school career. His dad must have recognized that. What could he have been thinking?
+ + +
The morning of the funeral was hot and muggy. Ambrose broke into a sweat the moment he put on his dad’s suit coat. The heat and humidity brought out more of the cologne lurking deep in the fabric.
After they were parked at the funeral home, his mother turned to Ambrose and Hannah. “I want both of you to show some respect. Your father may have been the town clown, but that doesn’t mean people won’t be sad to see him go. Shake hands, thank people for coming, and don’t smile. There’s nothing funny here.”
“Dad would have hated his funeral,” Ambrose said, and received a slap on the knee for his honesty.
The funeral director intercepted them at the doorway and led them to the viewing room, where, in front of the casket, a podium was set up facing several rows of folding chairs. Ambrose carefully avoided looking at his father’s corpse.
During the funeral, Ambrose couldn’t help but wonder who the person was that was being eulogized. His boss at the clothing store talked about the warm and deft Jerry. Another guy, who organized a fantasy football league Jerry took part in, described him as generous. A high school football teammate praised his indomitable spirit, although he stumbled over the word and said abdominal spirit.
Where were the twin-edges of humor and anger that defined his dad, Ambrose wondered? The sweet and the bitter? Did they think they were burying an angel? After he’d played jokes on everyone in the room? Even his own children?
+ + +
After the funeral director announced that they would be leaving for the cemetery in five minutes, Beth whispered something to him. He nodded, and quickly hustled the few remaining guests out until the room was vacant except for Jerry, Beth, Ambrose and Hannah.
She grabbed Ambrose’s hand, Hannah’s hand, and pulled them toward the casket. Ambrose took a deep breath and looked at his father’s corpse for the first time. Jerry was wearing so much makeup he looked like a drag queen.
“This is it,” his mother said when they reached the casket. “Our last chance.”
Ambrose glanced at Hannah to see if she knew what their mother meant; she shook her head.
Beth dropped their hands, reached into her purse, and pulled out three thick black felt-tipped pens.
She handed one to Hannah and said, “You do the goatee.” Another to Ambrose, said, “and you do the moustache. I’ll do his sideburns.”
Ambrose didn’t move.
Beth put her hand on his shoulder. “You need to forgive him, Ambrose; he couldn’t help the way he was.”
Ambrose shrugged her hand off, then stepped to the head of the casket where he could look down on his father, upside down. The man looked solemn as a judge.
Dragging the black marker through the makeup, the moustache Ambrose drew was uneven and broken, which infuriated him. He went over them a second time, harder, but now the lines smeared. He threw the marker against the wall as hard as he could and walked away.
When they were done, Beth took a photo with her phone before closing the casket for the last time.
+ + +
On the long ride to the graveyard, Uncle Blair attempted to cheer Beth up by telling a few of Jerry’s favorite jokes. Ambrose was only half listening, when one of the punch lines caused him to think about the whole mourning process. Suddenly he recognized that it was all a farce—funny costumes and ritual words, batty characters and overwrought emotions.
Perhaps, he thought, this kind of insight is my father’s legacy to me.
If so, he felt terribly short-changed. When his buddy Hank’s dad died, Hank had inherited a Harley.
Nonetheless, on arrival at the cemetery, before exiting the limo to carry the casket to the grave, Ambrose slipped one of the felt-tipped pens out of his mother’s purse. Using the driver mirror, through his tears he carefully drew a moustache on his own face.
