For Better or Hearse

Chapter Two

Three Years Later

H ollywood Forever is hopping. Tourists stroll the lush grounds. The scent of honeysuckle floats in the light breeze. Sparkling June sunlight ripples across the Garden of Legends Lake. Ash wishes for clouds. She’s burning alive in her boots.

Still, she smiles and waves goodbye to her tour. The last of the day. As she walks toward her favorite bench, she inhales. LA. It’s where she comes from. Deep in her blood, endless sunshine and summers and smog. Hook it to her veins.

Nearby, a couple snaps a photo of the grave of Johnny Ramone. She could fill a library with her love for Los Angeles, and particularly the cemeteries.

Not only is Hollywood Forever Cemetery the resting place for many of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s golden age, but it’s Ash’s favorite place for peace and quiet. For many, a walk among the dead is macabre, but to her, it’s peaceful.

Wiping sweat from her brow, she stops over a grave, her black combat boots dusty from her trek outside. She looks down at her new acquaintance. Jayne Mansfield.

Celebrities at their most human. She could take a lesson.

At the ping of her phone, Ash retrieves it from her pocket and smiles.

Tessie: Poop disaster averted. Call incoming.

As promised, the FaceTime call comes through. Like clockwork. Ash never misses a call with her cousin. No matter how many blowouts or babies or deaths. No matter the daily drudge. It’s their commitment to each other. Ash would never survive this life without Tessie.

She’s the most important thing in her universe.

Tessie, sparkling-eyed and fresh-faced and definitely not sweating, blinks at her from the screen.

“Lay it on me, preggo,” Ash says.

“What about…” Tessie makes jazz hands. “Tallulah?”

Ash makes a face. “Absolutely not.” After her mother saddled her with the absolute worst name in the world, Ash refuses to let Tessie do the same to her child.

Tessie sighs and waves a hand around her belly. “It’s the hormones. I swear I like the strangest things these days. Ask me about my obsession with bee pollen.”

Tessie’s two-year-old son, Wilder, toddles in the background. “Aunt Bash, Aunt Bash, Aunt Bash,” he chants, making Ash sound like a destructive video game villain.

She leans into the screen, wishing she could reach in, grab her cousin and squeeze. “How is my favorite tiny human?”

Tessie laughs. “Which one?” she asks, palming her belly. “Bear or…”

“The barely formed.” Ash pokes a finger at the screen. At Tessie’s round belly.

“She is currently the size of a banana and subjecting my bladder to a myriad of spectacular sucker punches.”

Ash tosses her head back and hoots. “Solomon’s mountain man sperm really claiming that uterus.”

At a large kitchen table covered in design boards and Pantone chips, Tessie grips her belly and lowers herself into a chair. Even five-months pregnant, she’s the epitome of Vogue perfection. Glossy blond hair, bright brown eyes, tan skin with a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose.

Ash is her opposite: dark, moody and pale as hell.

As kids, their mothers called them white swan and black swan cousins .

Not only because of their looks.

Late, Ash.

Early, Tessie.

Chaos and confusion, Ash.

Calm and order, Tessie.

They could have taken lessons from each other; instead, they egged each other on in all the best ways.

“I miss you,” Tessie says, her brown eyes suddenly full of a soft sadness.

Ash’s heart expands at the words.

Since the moment her cousin and best friend moved to Alaska two years ago, their distance has been a gaping wound in her soul. Despite what feels like an entire continent between them, the lock and key of their friendship has stayed strong. They still have their rhythm. It’s just shaken up and stirred thanks to babies and miles and that thing called life.

Though Ash is always homesick for her cousin, Tessie is where she’s supposed to be. Alaska. Getting railed daily by her bearded mountain man.

“I miss you too.” Ash takes a seat on her favorite bench. Beneath her feet, the grave of Fay Wray. “God, what I wouldn’t do to teleport you a hug right now.”

“Well?” Tessie’s eyes, now brimming with doubt, flicker to the phone. “Are you packed?”

Ash raises a hand. “Hold, please.”

Overhearing a tourist searching for the grave of Judy Garland, Ash points her in the right direction. Saturday afternoon, and the cemetery is packed with tourists studying maps in the bright sunlight and the sweltering heat.

“Do you think I’m packed?” Ash says, coming back to the conversation. “Or do you think my suitcase is lying in the bottom of my closet, filled with vintage copies of Nancy Drew and dried-up sea monkeys? ”

Tessie squeals in protest. “I absolutely can not with you right now.”

Ash, knowing last-minute packing goes against every bone in Tessie’s perfectionist body, smothers a smile.

“How can you not be packed?” Her cousin huffs. “You leave tomorrow.”

“I am a one-woman show. You know that. And I have more important things to worry about.”

“Like Augustus.”

Her heart squeezes. “Like Augustus.”

Her newest client, Augustus Fox, is a wealthy hotel magnate. He’s flying her and his family to Hawaii for one last family vacation. It’s the oddest job she’s ever had.

And Ash is the odd-job queen.

She tried. Tried hard to do the thing known as the American dream and make something of herself.

After high school, she enrolled at USC, where she did poorly. Couldn’t sit. Mind too wild. She dropped out. Meanwhile, Tessie excelled, working her ass off in school while waitressing to pay for it and eventually flourishing in her interior design career.

Ash spent most of her twenties playing Russian roulette with entry-level positions, taking the first humdrum desk job she could find, one after another. She burned through seven in her first year. And she hated them all. With the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. The butt-in-a-chair-and-work mentality. Corporate ass-kissing. The part of life where a person is required to get a paycheck in order to live.

It was too rote. Too boring.

She longed to do something unhinged and beautiful.

Eventually, that need led her to death.

The first death that hit hard wasn’t personal. It was Princess Diana. Her mother and aunt cried. Big tears that rivaled the tears they’d shed when they watched Steel Magnolias . It confused young Ash. It fascinated her. She was glued to the TV. The funeral. That envelope sitting atop the casket. What was in it? What did it say? Would Diana ever really know? She asked Tessie what she thought happened to people when they died. Her cousin responded with a shrug and an I don’t know .

Ash didn’t know either. So she went to the library. She read book after book. Had all kinds of questions. Where do we go? Does the big man in the sky greet people with cocktails and high fives? Or is it an endless black nothing?

And then, when she and Tessie were seventeen, death hit closer to home. Her Aunt Sophie, Tessie’s mother, passed.

Core memory there, that feeling of her stomach sinking. That knowledge that nothing in the world she knew would ever be right again. The sight of Tessie collapsing to her knees in the hallway of the hospital and sobbing with her entire soul, I don’t know how to do this , and even though her words scared her so fucking badly, set a fire loose in her chest, Ash took her in her arms and swept her off to all-night movie marathon.

Her mom was sad. Her best friend was sad. She was too, but all Ash wanted to do was heal them. Help. Only, she didn’t know how.

Over the years, Ash honed her craft. Her job search skills. Off-jobs, this time. Dog walker. Art model. Say what you want about LA, but she has had one fantastic job after another. After discovering she had a talent for crying on cue, she started her own business. She became a professional funeral mourner. Then, after her botched relationship with Jakob, she expanded into professional wedding objector.

A profession she abandoned three years ago.

Nathaniel Whitford and his dagger-eyed glare haunt her nightmares. The pain on his face. What she did. Everything about it was icky. She was icky.

She didn’t like herself in that period of her life. Jakob’s betrayal launched her into her villain origin story. It changed the trajectory of her life and influenced the decisions she made. Objecting to weddings, hurting people even if they deserved it, were very bad decisions. She fumbled. Eventually, she worked to course correct.

The change began soon after the Nathaniel Whitford almost-wedding. While she was attending a funeral, working as a professional mourner, she met a woman who was a death doula. They had coffee after, and the prospect pulled her in. It felt like a hell yes . Every aspect of it—the freedom of care she could offer, the lack of strong regulations that came with working in an office, the fact that death is the most natural part of life, yet somehow generates so much fear.

Two weeks later, Ash enrolled in a death midwife certification and earned the first degree she’s ever had.

After two years, she can confidently say that her death doula gig is no longer an odd job. It’s her passion. A calling she’s honored to have found.

New leaf.

Helping, not hurting.

“Remind me again,” Tessie says, bringing her back to the conversation. “You’re gone for how many days?”

“Fourteen-ish.” Ash squints, working to recall the itinerary she’s barely scrolled through. Go-with-the-flow is more her speed. “We fly out tomorrow morning at nine and land in Honolulu.”

“God. I wish I could come and rot on a beach with you.”

“I wish you could too,” Ash says, then groans. “Why couldn’t I get a client who likes snow in the Alps?” She thrives among new people. She just doesn’t thrive in subtropical climates.

Tessie snorts. “You hate snow too.”

“True. But I could be sitting in a lodge with blankets and fuzzy hats and spiked hot chocolate.”

“Adorable fuzzy hats,” Tessie adds wistfully. Then she shoots a narrowed gaze at Ash. “Think of it as payback for ditching me on my babymoon.”

Ash rolls her eyes. “I will never hear the end of it, will I? Even if you are carrying the second of Solomon’s brawny heathen spawn. ”

A low rumble of a growl. “I heard that.”

Solomon comes into view, leaning in from one side, his burly flannel-clad shoulder blocking Tessie’s face.

The way Solomon sets a plate of food in front of his wife, then sweeps a kiss over her lips, makes Ash’s cheeks warm. Her cousin looks for all the world like a lovesick teenager. It’s impressive. Clearly, Solomon Wilder has mellowed Tessie out with that extra-large dick of his.

“God, I’m such a whore for your love story,” Ash muses.

Tessie laughs. Ash smiles.

Love.

It’s all she ever wanted for her cousin.

Herself? She’ll steer clear, thank you very much.

Solomon sweeps a lock of hair behind Tessie’s ear, and that’s when she catches a glimpse of the dark circles under her cousin’s eyes.

Ash frowns, and a niggle of worry worms its way through her. “Are you sure you’re sleeping enough?” she asks, suddenly hating the distance between them. “What’s wrong?”

Scowling, Tessie presses palms to her stomach. “You’re as bad as Solomon.”

“She’s fine,” Solomon says, giving Ash a look of mutually assured overprotection.

Memories of that time, Tessie near death, always leave her feeling panicky and breathless and anxious. The closest to a breakdown she’s ever come. Her own death doesn’t scare her. But her cousin? The one person she needs in this life, the only person who’s ever understood her, who never questions her weird, who loves her fiercely even when she doesn’t love herself? Her close call almost ended Ash.

Nothing will ever happen to Tessie again. Not on her or Solomon’s watch.

Tessie smiles after her mountain man, then turns her attention back to Ash. “Are you okay?” Her voice gets hushed. Her brown eyes burn with worry. “Going to Hawaii?”

Ash’s stomach plummets, then snaps back into place. Hawaii is one of many bad callbacks to her relationship with Jakob. Do not pass go. Do not flash back. Do not let your reptilian brain run down that track.

She swallows hard.

“I’ll be fine,” she says. “Of course, I hate that we’re over the ocean. Have you seen my algorithm?”

“You almost went to Mexico,” Tessie points out.

“Mexico was different. And that was for you.”

“You’re there for your client, but you try to have fun too. Don’t reserve your amazing good moods exclusively for me. Don’t forget sugar. Find a graveyard. Oh! Better, a haunted lighthouse. And call me every day so I know you haven’t fallen into a volcano.”

Ash smiles at Tessie’s frazzled mom energy.

“Go on a date while you’re there. Have fun with a hot surf instructor.”

“I don’t have time for dates.”

Tessie wiggles her brows. “Just the dead?”

Ash looks down at the grave beneath her boots. “Something like that.”