The Dead Romantics (51)

“So—what—you believe in love but just not for you? You believe in romance and grand romantic gestures and happily ever afters but you think there is something so fundamentally wrong with you that you don’t deserve it?”

“It’s better than not believing in it at all, isn’t it?” he snapped back.

I rolled my eyes and slammed my laptop closed. “I’ve got to go—do something. But for what it’s worth? You’re wrong.” Then I hopped off my stool and stalked out of the bar and up the stairs to my room, and he didn’t follow. Carver texted me a little while later, while I was pacing back and forth in my hotel room, trying to calm down.

Wanna wash some graves? he asked.

Not really, I replied.

Too bad, sis.

Ugh, fine. After I’d changed clothes into something I wouldn’t mind sweating in, I came back down and peeked into the bar, but Ben was gone.

Good. I was too angry to deal with him right now, anyway.

Carver and Nicki were waiting outside on the porch when I came out. Nicki was a short and stocky man with an angular face and thick black glasses to match his thick black hair and warm brown skin. His family owned a hotel in Cancún, so he understood the trials and tribulations of a family business. I was at least thankful for that—he understood the little nuances in our family, the weight Dad’s death left on us. I was glad Carver had him, especially now.

Carver had always been the one with his heart on his sleeve.

On the front veranda, Carver held up a portable pressure sprayer and a blue bucket filled with sponges and scrapers. “Ready to have some fun?”

“If that’s what you want to call it, sure,” I replied coldly.

He gave a low whistle. “What’s got you all twisted?”

Ben. The fact that he thought it was his fault that—“Nothing. Just work stuff,” I added, not quite lying.

“Well, perk up! Because this is work, too,” he insisted, and then narrowed his eyes. “Grave work.”

“That was bad.”

“Dead on arrival?” he asked, scrunching his nose.

I snorted. “Let’s get going, yeah? The sun’s going to set in an hour and I can’t be there after dark.”

“Hell yeah!” Carver pumped his fist into the air, and then turned, grabbing his partner by the wrist, and led him down the path to the sidewalk. “Nicki loves doing this.”

Nicki nodded. “It’s very soothing, and gives your arms a fantastic workout.”

“All the better to squeeze me tighter.”

“You’re my tightest squeeze.”

They kissed, and I made a face. “Ugh, gross. True love.”

“Tastes like a Taylor Swift song,” Carver added, and began to hum “The Story of Us,” which made me just want to throw myself off the nearest bridge. Resisting, I followed them to the cemetery, trying to shove my annoyance with Ben as far down into my gut as possible.

“Should we invite Alice?” Nicki asked.

Carver shook his head. “Nah. I bet she’s about to have a mental breakdown anyway, what with the makeup news from this morning.”

“Poor Alice . . .”

Alice was the only one who didn’t really care to scrub gravestones. When we were little, Dad would sometimes pick us up from school with a bucket in one hand, and a portable pressure sprayer in the other, and tell us that we were going to visit some friends. The friends always turned out to be gravestones in the Mairmont cemetery—the older ones that’d survived through hurricanes and tornadoes and half a century of grime and moss. Their letters half-hidden in time, their dates worn by wind and rain. Dad said they needed love, too, even after everyone who remembered them was dead.

So we spent some afternoons scrubbing gravestones clean. It wasn’t something any of us ever really got out of doing—or wanted to. The cemetery in the afternoon light looked soft and peaceful. In the top left corner, under one of the large oaks, there was a plot taped off. No one had started digging yet, but my throat tightened anyway.

That was where Dad would be.

It looked different in the daylight.

Carver pointed toward the bottom right corner. “Those look pretty grimy. What do you think?”

“I’ll take the one that looks like Madame Leota,” I replied, pointing to one of the older ones that had at least a century of dirt caked on it. Those were more delicate work. I liked that kind of work. The meticulousness of it.

Carver, Nicki, and I grabbed the scrapers out of the bucket, sudsed our sponges, and went to work. I took the scraper and scraped off all of the grime and moss, and soaked it down with the pressure sprayer. After a while, when I’d finally gotten back into the groove, I’d cleaned it well enough to make out the delicate insets of the face’s eyes.

“Remember when you and Alice were playing tag and accidentally broke a headstone and Dad had to glue it back together with Gorilla Glue?” Carver asked, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm.

I laughed at the memory. “Dad was beside himself.”

“You could barely tell it was broken. I was more worried about your head. You cracked it good against the headstone.”

“Alice was so worried,” I mused, scrubbing at the name and dates. Elizabeth Fowl. “She stayed up all night in my room to make sure I didn’t die or something. She was always like that. Looking after me.”