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Peachy Flippin' Keen by Molly Harper (1)

1

FRANKIE MCCREADY DABBED one last touch of lipstick on Spud McArthur’s lower lip. Generally, she kept the makeup on her male clients a bit subtler than the treatment she gave the ladies. Families didn’t much care to know that Grandpa was going to his final resting place with a layer of Peachy Keen on his lips. But Spud had tangled with pancreatic cancer during the last months of his life, so Frankie was having to use every cream and powder at her disposal to restore his healthy appearance.

In his final months Spud’s cheeks had become gaunt and his skin sallow. Frankie didn’t want that to be the last image his family had of him. They deserved to remember him as a ruddy-faced, energetic man, even if he’d been a bit of a jackass in life—particularly when it came to politics and his rabid support of University of Georgia’s football team.

Spud’s condition reminded her uncomfortably of Uncle Junior, her mentor, her friend, who had suffered a similar death. Junior had been one of the best men she ever knew, and Frankie was blessed enough to know a wealth of good men. She hadn’t dated one yet, because she was related to most of them, and there were laws against that sort of thing.

Frankie gave Spud’s prominent nose one last dusting of finishing powder and closed the lower portion of the casket lid. Spud’s family had ordered a small casket spray in Georgia Bulldogs black, white, and red, but it was waiting upstairs in the chapel. Her great-uncle, E.J.J., the head of the funeral operation at McCready Family Funeral Home and Bait Shop, preferred to add little touches like that at the last minute before visitations, so everything was perfect when the bereaved arrived. Mourners could fixate on tiny details, like a lapel bent out of shape or ceremony programs printed on the wrong shade of off-white paper, and in their grief get wet-possum mad at the “disrespect” to the deceased’s wishes. That’s when ugly scenes started, and when you became known as the funeral parlor that allowed knock-down, drag-out fights in the chapels, you started attracting the wrong sort of crowd.

Frankie pushed the casket cart toward the elevator and pressed the button. “Good-bye, Mr. Spud. I will miss the boiled peanuts you made for Founders’ Day. I will not miss the way you added ‘the Bulldogs and anybody dumb enough not to root for the Bulldogs’ to the prayer list every Sunday. But Lake Sackett won’t be the same without you.”

She gently rolled the casket into the waiting elevator car and elbow-nudged the button that would alert E.J.J. and her father, Bob, that Spud was coming up. As the elevator doors closed, she stripped off her gloves and stretched her aching back. Spud was her fourth customer that day. Autumn was always a busy time for funeral homes, particularly in towns like Lake Sackett where the population was heavily comprised of baby boomers, but this was getting ridiculous. They were going to have to hire her an assistant if things kept going at this rate. Even her father’s near-miraculous organizational skills were being pushed to their limit.

Frankie was definitely looking forward to the end of the tourist season in a few weeks. Her cousin, Margot, had recently breathed new life into the town by organizing one of the best Founders’ Day festivals they’d ever seen, and the marina side of the business was still experiencing the ripple effect. Over the last week or so, thousands of people from across the Southeast had flocked to town to spend the last warm days of fall on Lake Sackett, shelling out for boat rentals, hotel rooms, food, beer. Most of the businesses in town expected to benefit from the boom somehow.

It was embarrassing that something called the “water dump” had caused so many problems for Frankie’s hometown over the years. A few years before, some dipshit with the Army Corps of Engineers had messed up when calculating how much water needed to be released through the dam at Sackett Point and overestimated by a couple of million gallons—releasing about ten times the water they should have. Lake Sackett dropped to record lows, just in time for a two-year drought. No rain meant no water to replace what was lost.

Less water meant less room on the lake for fishing boats and water sports. It meant more exposed, sunbaked shoreline, which made for some pretty depressing vistas. Depressing vistas meant fewer people renting cabins and buying groceries or visiting the fudge shop or the exotic jerky depot.

The economics of it all had crept up slowly. At first, people just made do with less. They weren’t able to repaint their stores or refurbish their rental cabins, which gave the town a shabby, weathered look. Fewer people rented those motel rooms and cabins, because who wants to take their family to a shabby, weathered motel for a weekend? Tourists booked their holidays in towns where the water was abundant and the locals seemed less desperate. So now Lake Sackett was feeling the full financial brunt of multiple slow seasons. Businesses and restaurants were closing all over town. Families that had lived there for generations had moved away to find work.

McCready’s funeral business wasn’t entirely immune to this downturn. People still died whether they were poor or rich; it was just a question of how much they spent on their way out. But the marina side of the business had definitely taken a hit. Fewer tourists meant less bait and tackle being sold, less food moving through the Snack Shack, less gas being pumped. Fewer charters meant Cousin Duffy and Aunt Donna had more time on their hands, which could prove dangerous. She could only hope Margot’s efforts turned it around.

Sighing, Frankie shrugged out of her lab coat and hung it on her hook, next to the one labeled UNCLE JUNIOR. It had been more than five years and she couldn’t bear to get rid of his lab coat. No one in the family really came down to her domain, so it was a little quirk she could keep to herself.

It took a considerable amount of stubbornness and effort to maintain a private life in a family as big and “involved” as the McCreadys. But Frankie managed it by sneaking away to Atlanta for weekends, blowing off steam with drinks and dancing and other age-appropriate activities that reminded her she was alive. Just a few days ago, she’d met some friends from an online group for Pacific Rim fans and ended up at a nightclub in an old restored opera house in midtown. Her family loved her, but they didn’t need to know that she’d ground the night away with a complete stranger and then gone back to his apartment. Or that she’d waited for him to fall asleep and then Ubered back to her car, because she was not big on awkward morning-after conversations.

And now she was thinking about sex in her workspace, which was a bit of a squicky gray zone, professionally speaking.

Frankie slung her heavy bag over her shoulder and took the stairs two at a time, a skill she had mastered even in her clunky purple wedge sandals. Her mother, Leslie, appeared at the top of the stairs, her faded ginger hair frizzled around her head in a backlit corona like Our Lady of the Snack Shack. She grinned down at her daughter. “Hey, honey, I was just about to pop by and see if you needed any dinner. I’ve got a pork shoulder in the Crock-Pot at home, but if you need somethin’ now, I can whip up some chicken right quick.”

Frankie quirked her petal-bright lips, giving her mama a skeptical smirk.

“Oh, yes, I’m starvin’,” Frankie moaned dramatically, clutching her middle. “I used a considerable amount of energy trying to digest the enormous lunch you fed me today.”

“Well, honey, you’re on your feet all day and need to keep your strength up,” Leslie said, shaking her head as she wrapped an arm around her daughter. “Besides, your dad said this was a real busy day today. You needed a break,” Leslie sniffed.

Frankie shook her head. She loved her parents dearly, but they were one step away from shoving Frankie into one of those giant hamster balls for fear she might hurt herself tying her shoes. They weren’t helicopter parents. That would imply they simply hovered, as opposed to being attached to her back.

“I needed elastic pants after eating that triple-decker turkey sandwich,” Frankie told her.

“It had lettuce and tomato, it was practically a salad,” Leslie argued, making Frankie snicker.

Reaching the top of the steps, they walked through the open “dog run” area between the funeral chapel and the office.

“You know the doctor said he’d like to see you put on a couple more pounds . . .” Leslie’s voice trailed off as a thick, high-pitched grating sound caught her attention from the direction of the lake.

“Do you hear that?” she asked Frankie. “It sounds like an outboard motor, but really far away.”

Suddenly, the noise was replaced by the hum of a vacuum cleaner. Frankie and her mother followed the sound down the concrete steps to the docks. They spotted Cousin Duffy standing in the open doorway of Jack’s Tackle and Stuff with a Shop-Vac, frantically swiping it across the shop floor.

“What in the world?” Leslie tilted her head. But whether she was confused by outdoor vacuuming or the sight of Duffy doing housework, Frankie had no idea.

“I need some help here!” Duffy shouted, his sweaty red-gold curls plastered to his head.

Leslie and Frankie ran to the bait shop, stepping over hundreds of bait crickets as they stampeded down the wooden planks. Even over the rumble of the vacuum, they could hear the chirping of the crickets. Frankie looked inside the darkened interior of the bait shop and saw that the walls and floors seemed to be writhing, waves of tiny black-brown insects bouncing off every surface.

“Some jackass opened my bait-cricket cage and all of my bugs got loose!” Duffy cried.

Frankie grabbed a broom and started sweeping the little critters into a five-gallon bucket. Leslie ran to the other prong of the three-way dock to close the doors and windows to the Snack Shack, preventing a biblical invasion of her culinary kingdom.

Duffy and Frankie started methodically gathering as many of the crickets as they could, returning them to the wire-mesh bait cage.

“Who would do somethin’ like that?” Leslie wondered as she jogged back into the bait shop.

Duffy carefully emptied the Shop-Vac into the wire cage. “Probably some tourist pissed off that he didn’t catch his limit. I had a charter client threaten to sue me this week because he went the whole morning without catching a mackerel.”

“Aw, bless his heart. Did you explain to him that a mackerel is a saltwater fish and he was an idiot?” Frankie asked.

“You know, I tried, but somehow it just didn’t get through to him,” Duffy said. “As it is, I just lost another client scheduled for a sunset charter. He walked in, took one look at the bugs, and ran. I guess losin’ control of my shop to a bunch of invertebrates probably doesn’t put me in the most professional light.”

Frankie gave him a small side hug. This was part of the problem with having a customer service job. Even when the customers were enormous shit heels, you weren’t allowed to slap them. There was a reason Frankie didn’t work with living people.

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” she said with a sigh.

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