You put back the urn. You exit the store. The vacuum is still going, but it’s not close by, and just around the corner is a set of wide wooden doors, soundless when opened, which send you into what appears to be, at first glance, a small courtroom.

It’s not a real courtroom. It’s a courtroom like what you might see in a grade-school production of Inherit the Wind, and you should know since it’s the only play in which you ever took part. There are church pews, six on a side, and the twelve pews all lead up to a podium that looks two-dimensional, next to which stands a plastic American flag on a pole. Running along the right side of the pews is a brown plastic room divider. A partition. This, you realize, is where Murphy & Milliken’s holds wakes.

You were Meeker in Inherit the Wind in Ms. Sline’s class, the sweeping bailiff at the Hillsboro Courthouse whose words have always stayed with you: “Matthew Harrison Brady…” you recall. “I seen him once. At a Chautauqua meeting in Chattanooga,” and this you say out loud, it’s your favorite line, and how you drove your mother crazy saying it, you remember, over and over: “…a Chautauqua meeting in Chattanooga,” which came right before “The tent poles shook! Who’s gonna be your lawyer, son?”—and you stop.

Because this, it’s what Greg Tampico said to you the night that you met, as he was loosening his tie in the foyer of his walk-up, and you suddenly start imagining scenarios: like Greg Tampico is here, and he is going to pop out from behind the partition and go, like, surprise or more likely hey, dummy; or, like, Tampico is going to do something bigger, like pop out of a coffin or something (ta-da); and you can so totally picture Tampico, like, hang gliding into the parking lot of Murphy & Milliken’s, but all you really want him to do is quietly open the doors, enter into this silent room, and creep up behind you on this wall-to-wall carpeting, and you can almost feel his broad chest pressing your shoulder blades now, his breath wet and warm on the back of your neck, when the eight lamps that hang down from the ceiling in pairs are turned on with a click—

“Greg,” you say, and face the doors.

It’s not Greg Tampico. It’s a janitor, a vacuum in one hand, and around the other, the long vacuum cord is festooned. His nametag says MARLEN.

“Can I help you,” he says.

Marlen, not fat but wide-middled, displays crooked, nut-colored teeth and these awful peaked eyebrows that make him look shocked. Marlen likely never made it past high school, you estimate (this is the part of your job you are really good at), but most definitely has a family, maybe a son or two, full-grown with wives pregnant, and though you are maybe just ten years apart, in one glance you can see the whole future cut of Marlen, the outline and mold of the old man he’s on the cusp of becoming, and all this plant needs is a bit more sun and water, a bit more weathering of the skin, more ash in the hair, but he is well on his way, and his sudden appearance in the room, belt gripping his middle, ring of keys jangling a bad song off his hip, quite frankly makes you feel as though you’ve been cast into a boat departing the world of the living, and his vacuum’s the oar.