Chapter 1: Monday

Your mother dies on a Sunday and Monday you go to work.

This is what you do. You and your father. You weigh dead people. You record the weight. You tag the toe. You slide the drawer shut. The stainless steel drawer makes a sound like a refrigerator closing. Which is what it is. A refrigerator for meat.

The fact is, a human body loses twenty-one grams at the moment of death. Some doctor in 1907 weighed six dying patients on a special bed-scale and recorded the exact instant their weight dropped. Twenty-one grams. The soul, people said. The soul weighs twenty-one grams.

Your father told you this on your first day. You were sixteen. You needed a summer job and he needed help with the overflow from the highway pileup. Twenty-three bodies in three days. You held the feet. He held the shoulders. You learned that bodies are heavy in a way living people are not.

That was twelve years ago.

Your mother weighed ninety-four pounds when she died. The cancer ate everything else.

She is not here. The county crematory took her Sunday night. Direct cremation, no service, per her wishes. Your father signed the papers with the same pen he uses for death certificates. Blue ink. Steady hand. You stood in the kitchen and watched him turn your mother into paperwork.

Now it is Monday and here is today's first customer. White male, approximately forty-five years old, found in his apartment after three weeks. The smell got the neighbors to call.

The smell is sulfur and sweetness. The smell is meat left in a hot car. You breathe through your mouth. This is rule one. Breathe through your mouth and the smell cannot attach itself to the memory center of your brain. It stays abstract. It stays professional.

Your father pulls the zipper down. The face is bloated. The skin is purple-black. The abdomen has split open from the gas. This is what happens. Bacteria in the gut keep eating after the heart stops. They produce methane. The methane has nowhere to go.

You write down: white male, approximately 180 pounds, advanced decomposition.

Your father says nothing. He has said nothing all morning. He lifts the shoulders. You lift the feet. The skin slides under your gloved hands. You adjust your grip. You transfer the body to the scale. The digital readout flickers. One-seven-eight.

You write: 178 pounds.

Your father takes the toe tag from the counter. He fastens it. His hands do not shake. His hands have never shaken. Not when he held your mother's hand in the hospice. Not when he signed the cremation authorization. Not now.

Rule two: the dead do not care how you feel about them.

You learned this rule the summer you were sixteen, when a motorcycle crash brought in a girl your age. Her helmet had come off. Her face was perfect. Her skull was empty. Your father weighed her. You tagged her toe. You went home and could not eat dinner.

Your father ate. Pot roast. Mashed potatoes. String beans. Your mother asked how your day went. Your father said, fine, the usual. He did not mention the girl. You understood. The dead stay at work. The dead do not come home.

Except now your mother is dead.

She is dead and your father is closing the drawer. The drawer slides shut. The sound is metal on metal. Final.

Your father strips off his gloves. He drops them in the hazard bin. He washes his hands. Soap to the elbow. Twenty seconds. He dries them with brown paper towels. He throws the towels away. He walks to the break room.

You follow.

He sits at the folding table. You sit across from him. Between you is a Mr. Coffee machine from 1987. It gurgles. The coffee tastes like the plastic pot it brews in. Your father drinks it black. You drink it black. Your mother drank it with cream and sugar. Past tense.

Your father drinks his coffee.

You drink your coffee.

The fluorescent lights hum. The refrigerator units hum. The building is all humming. A chorus of machines keeping bodies cold until the bodies can be cut open, drained, examined, and released.

Your father finishes his coffee. He stands. He throws the cup away. He walks back to the weighing room.

You follow.

This is Monday. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Wednesday comes after that. Then Thursday. Then Friday.

Five days until the weekend.

Your mother is ash in a cardboard box.

Your father lifts the next body.