Roost by Ali Bryan

suppose.”
    “He like Dilly Bars?”
    “Does who like Dilly Bars, Joan?”
    “Jesus.”
    I remove a peanut from my sundae and crunch into it. “I’m sure Jesus likes Dilly Bars.”
    Joan breaks her Dilly Bar stick in half.
    “Is Grandpa going to go to heaven too?” Wes asks.
    “Someday.”
    “But they go everywhere together.” He leans his head against the window and points to an inflatable pumpkin on top of a car dealership. “We don’t have a pumpkin,” he says. His eyes fill with tears.
    “You’re right.” Halloween is tomorrow or next week. Is it today? “Let’s go get one right now.”
    We drive across the parking lot to the grocery store. I check my iPhone. Right, it’s the 24th of October. Mom has only been dead for one day. The kids have no costumes, but we don’t need to panic about a pumpkin quite yet.
    “What do you want to be for Halloween?” I ask Wes, unbuckling him from his car seat.
    “I want to be …” he pauses and places his finger on his chin. “A pirate!”
    “What about me?” Joan chimes.
    “You already told me you wanted to be a cat squirrel.”
    “No,” she argues.
    “Well what then?”
    “Me want to be a stroke.”

14
    By the next day
, I’m carving pumpkins and cutting costume pieces out of discount fabrics. The kitchen table is taken over by seeds and pipe cleaners and scraps of felt. I’m constantly moving needles and sharp things to the centre of the table where Joan is less likely to get at them. Scattered in between our decorations are notes on the funeral. Times and dates and estimates on everything from catering to caskets. There are lists of psalms and sheet music. “Sable Island” does not make the cut.
    Dan calls. “What if we framed some of her favourite recipes and displayed them at the visitation Friday?”
    “What?”
    “They were sort of her claim to fame.”
    “Yeah, but you don’t do that.”
    “Why not? I think she’d like it.”
    “No.” I take a sewing needle from the wine glass and scrape my teeth.
    “Her pecan and goat cheese salad, beef stroganoff, and blueberry grunt. I already had Allison-Jean print them off on cardstock.”
    “That’s great, Dan. Is she printing off a wine list too?”
    “And what if we had one of her former students give a eulogy?”
    “The funeral’s in four days.”
    “It would be just a few words about Mom as a teacher.”
    “She taught grade two.” I poke my gums until they start to bleed.
    “So? They’d be grown-up now. It could be nice.”
    “Are you nuts? Have you ever been to a funeral?”
    “I’m just trying to make it special!”
    “A recipe for blueberry crisp and some former student’s memory of how she taught them to spell ‘cat’ does not make it special.”
    “Blueberry grunt.”
    “No!”
    “You’re being difficult.”
    “You’re being ridiculous!”
    He sniffs into the phone like he might be crying. I sigh. “You should be the one doing the eulogy. I’ll pick her dress and make sure her makeup looks okay. All she’d really care about is that no one fights and she’s wearing pantyhose. Okay?”
    “And the recipes.”
    “If it’s that important to you, display the recipes. And,”
fuck
, “do you think Allison-Jean could make Joan a cat squirrel costume?”
    “A what?”
    I give the phone to Joan to tell Allison-Jean what a cat squirrel is.
    After the kids are both in bed, I pour a glass of wine and start one of the tasks I’ve been putting off: sorting through photos. I dump out a Ziploc bag marked vacation.
    They’re not vacation photos, though. They date back to when we were in junior high. When I had a perm and Dan still had a weight problem. In one of them he has a black eye. Darrell Wilson kicked the shit out of him because Dan was fat and was in his way. Darrell Wilson who smoked rolled cigarettes and wore jean jackets and had sex with MirandaCoughlin, who worked at Tim Horton’s, when he was twelve. Sex with someone who had a job! Darrell Wilson with