Inheritance – Henrick Karoliszyn

November 26, 2025

Tommy Dugan crosses the gravel with a plastic grocery bag full of mortuary leftovers: waxed thread, a chipped bottle of formalin, a comb carrying three gray hairs like stowaways. He walks in and sets the bag on the counter of Dugan & Sons the way a man puts down a drink and decides not to finish it.
        The place smells like a basement grew fish gills: damp, chemical, and stale all at once. The foyer rug is a church carpet full of freckles. The wall clock ticks with a loud hand. In the viewing room, the satin of an empty casket is all that shines. A certificate that’s used-tea-bag-yellow hangs above a scratched mahogany desk reading: Seamus P. Dugan, Licensed Funeral Director.
        On the desk, Tommy touches his own handwriting. Next of kin: Thomas Francis Dugan, nephew, 18. When he wrote it that afternoon before the town lawyer and notary, the pen carried weight, the powerful words turning him into a man. Now, he feels small enough to tuck into the drawer of prayer cards.
        His uncle passed in the embalming room doing cleanup: a gauze coiled in his right hand, trocar laid out on a towel, faucet handle dripping. The heart attack was not his first, but it was the one that finished the job. Uncle Seamus used to say, We all conk out on our own tables. You don’t get to pick the dirt that takes you. You only hope you’ve left before you arrive.
        “There are more dead things than alive things,” he told Tommy whenever the boy watched him work too long. All the shutting eyes, gluing lips, squeezing rings over plumped fingers, causing him look at the ceiling. “Dinosaurs, Jesus, Presidents, Jimi Hendrix, the Mona Lisa. When you go, you’re in good company.”
        Tommy walks along the short hallway where stainless-steel counters hold squares of jagged light. The big fridge—the body box— whirrs. A draft hisses through the rear door, wood shrunk from old floods, the building on stilts in a lifelong battle with the surrounding waters. The place tastes medicinal in the lungs. He looks at Uncle Seamus’s chair, patched with duct tape that has grown its own hairs.
        The cop from the 100th was kind when he arrived on scene. The priest eyed the invoice book. Sister Dolores, with her paper-mâché hands, touched Tommy’s wrist and said, “You’ll do.” As if his fate had been already chosen.
        When he was eight, Uncle Seamus made him hold a deck of prayer cards beside a man who had hanged himself, his purple tongue lolling the shade of bad grapes. “Our Father who art in heaven …” and Tommy tried to keep his eyes off the dead man’s lids that wouldn’t stay shut without stubby fingers pressing.
        After the prayer and clean up, they split a soft serve by the Cross Bay Bridge. “Death is mostly housekeeping,” Uncle Seamus told him, which Tommy understood to mean that by the time the guests arrive, you’ve scrubbed away your pain.
        Now he is the housekeeper.
*
The Cadillac is older than God by one day, according to Uncle Seamus. A tiny hearse charm hangs from the ring, blackened wheels that do, in fact, turn. When Tommy presses them with his thumb, they leave a faint graphite grin on his finger.
        Outside, Cross Bay Boulevard with plumbers’ vans, buses groaning, a tow truck clanking metal ropes. The surrounding marsh looks like somebody’s green hair after sleeping wrong. The sun muscles through, and the reeds turn in the wind.
        He slides behind the wheel. The seat springs give like a bed. The engine wakes slowly then all at once. St. Christopher rattles in his clip, the saint doggedly ferrying, mid-stride forever. Tommy eases the Cadillac along the island’s drag, everything sloshing a beat behind. Boys on BMX bikes lift their chins at him. He drives with a vow of bad news for somebody.
        Past the bait shop sign that hurricane teeth tore off. Past the church with stairs that bend into the street. Past the deli where his mother once patted powdered sugar from his mouth with the side of her hand. At the end where asphalt turns to grass, he idles. The exhaust draws lines in the cold air behind the car.
        “I need help, Uncle Seamus,” he tells the gulls, the saint, the unforgiving cool air around the car. “I need guidance.”
        He shuts his eyes and says an Our Father.
*
The next day he cleans the room for the latest arrival. Caps bottles, loops gauze, wipes steel. He sits in Uncle Seamus’s chair and presses his palm to the armrest, waiting for transfer: warmth, instruction, blessing.
        On the wall, the first Dugan oversees operations with a mustache that looks royal. Tommy raises his jaw. “I’ll do it proper.”
        The phone rings. “Dugan & Sons,” he says on the third ring.
        “Do you take girls as young as sixteen?” the woman asks, voice congested from crying.
        “Yes,” he says, before the sentence can break. Capelli. Beach 94th. Aneurysm. His pen scrapes the ledger and leaves proof.
*
On Friday morning, the Capellis arrive: mother in a fur coat, face red; father a size too small for his jacket. They bring an envelope softened by worry, and a garment bag that smells like a perfume closet.
        “Her prom dress,” the mother says.
        He nods.
        In the embalming room when they leave, he unzips a pink satin that flares in the light. He smooths it with his palm. He imagines Angela alive, hair teased, bangles sounding, and then moves her into the stainless-steel body box.
*
Uncle Seamus’s notes still tape the cupboard: Incision here. Thread here. Drain there. God help us all. The handwriting looks tired. Tommy whispers, “All right, Angela. We’ll make you beautiful.” He has watched a dozen bodies loosen their hold on name. This is the first time he touches a dead body alone.
        Her skin is candle-wax pale, veins faint tributaries. Eyes half-lidded, a look that belongs to sleep, not death. He speaks under his breath the way you talk to a photograph. The washcloth makes a quiet sound across her arm.
        That night he parks at the edge of the marsh and cracks a beer. He shuts his eyes and says a prayer for Angela. He then begins to talk to her about his mother leaving, about Uncle Seamus’s jokes, about how loneliness hurts. Out in the black water, a buoy rings for whomever is listening.
*
Saturday brings photographs in a shoebox: Angela at Riis, Angela with a slumped snowman, Angela in a sweater borrowed from a future Angela who didn’t arrive. He pins them to green baize with soft pins. The florist calls — lilies late, truck mishap on the Belt, carnations scattered “like bad decisions,” the driver offers, cheerful.
        He pulls an old wreath and paints a ribbon: BELOVED DAUGHTER. The gold is thin. Uncle Seamus could stitch a lip straight after two whiskies. Tommy learns his hand by watching it fail.
        He finishes the work before the family returns. Mouth sutures neat, the seam hidden. The shoulder strap pinned where it insists on sin. The cheap hairspray sweetens the air and refuses to repent. He keeps himself right at the line between care and invention, which is where the living get to hover over the dead and feel useful.
        “You holding together?” Sister Dolores asks when she arrives, winter coat swallowing her and her breviary like a brick. The tip of her nose is chilly rouge.
        “I’m doing it proper.”
        “Proper and kind,” she says. “Kindness is the difference between a body and a person. Your uncle knew that.”
        The family comes, trailed by aunts that carry rosaries and uncles who smell of hair tonic. Cookies appear in a tin. Someone explains a recipe for a sauce. The mother takes Tommy’s hands and thanks him for making her daughter look like “she’s resting in Heaven.”
        “She is,” Tommy says.
        When the cigarettes call the last of the cousins out to the steps, Tommy stands in the doorway and looks at the girl. The lamp imitating sunlight makes the fabric into shiny sky. He tries the vows silently, not for God to hear but for the house.
        When he is finally alone with her that night, he reaches behind the drape and finds her ring. He lifts the satin the way you lift a child’s blanket to tuck it better. He slides the ring to the knuckle where it stops.
        “I will keep you safe,” he says, voice small enough to hide in. “As long as there’s anything of me left to keep.”
        Morning breaks. He irons his black shirt on the reception desk, a faint scorch anointing the wood. He knots his tie twice and nearly straight. The mirror gives him a boy auditioning for the role.
        The funeral is a practical miracle. Gasps that sound like rehearsals. Incense that makes the room taste Biblical. The priest delivers smoke; the smoke forgets where to go. At the burial ground, the straps whine and the box descends as if reluctant to discover who is waiting below.
        For the length of a heartbeat Tommy imagines climbing into the earth and letting the satin accept his cheek. The thought has weight. His boots tilt. Sister Dolores grips his shoulder—the force of paper-mâché hands, the insistence of faith —and he returns to the ground he’s been given.
        After, the house is emptier than a house should be. He sits in Uncle Seamus’s patched chair. The ledger lies open, and Angela’s name makes a dark seam on the page. Beneath it are blank lines.
        That night he drives past where the drag meets the bay and kills the engine. He thinks of the ring buried with her, of the kindness Sister Dolores insisted mattered most, of Uncle Seamus patching his chair with duct tape and calling it good enough for one more day. A breeze moves through the reeds and he imagines – just for a moment – his uncle’s hand on his shoulder, grounding him.
        Tommy starts the car back up. The headlights sweep across the marsh grass, making a fragile path. He takes it. Not because he knows where it leads, but because the work will be there in the morning, and someone must open the door.