“There’s still some work to do there. Turned into something anyway.”

“Bite me.”

“None of the other ceremonies hit me like that first one though.” She paused, and as she savored her wistfulness, an unbidden image from my first ceremony (the one with Eddie and Cayla) of the wilted body of Kathleen Blanchet developed in my head like one of Mercy’s Polaroids. She added, “And that bit from the letter Tom Jones wrote, that was his name, right?”

I nodded yes.

She said, “Hope is believing there’ll be another moment of joy, and despair is knowing there won’t be one more. That has stuck with me. The kind of thing you forget about until you remember it. Like last night, I was in the BK drive-thru and I never usually get fast food unless I’m with you because you’re such a picky eater—”

“Hey!”

“And I was behind some asshole in a pickup that needed a new exhaust, and that’s when I randomly thought about Jones and the line about hope and despair, and I was like, What am I doing here? And by the time I got to the window I was almost in tears. Happy or sad or both happy-sad, sad-happy? I don’t know. I was also kinda high.”

“You ate the roach?”

“I ate the roach. With a large Coke and fries.” Mercy parked in her usual spot.

I asked, “You okay?”

“Fine and/or dandy.”

[Note: It’s clear to me now she was trying to tell me something with her maudlin-ness, but I didn’t pick up on it then.]

I don’t mean this in a Fight Club/split-personality way. I’m real, obviously. But you’re making up so much of the content of our chats. I don’t know how much of this Mercy is me and how much is you.

* * *

The morning’s start at the funeral home went according to script. The dearly deceased was a peanut of a woman in her mid-nineties. Thirty minutes before the start of the service Mercy shot her photos and Mr. Stephens commented upon my slouching and the hearse driver offered me half of his cinnamon bun, and later, if I wanted, half of his chicken salad sandwich.