Jerry’s father died in a car crash along with two fishing buddies and it made the most sense to have all three funerals on the same day, in the same cemetery, so everyone could attend each burial, boom boom boom. Jerry’s father was the last of the three burials, and just as his coffin was going down into the grave, the director of the funeral home that had prepared the three bodies showed up. 

“There’s been a terrible mistake!” He said. 

He proceeded to say the body inside the coffin was not Jerry’s father. 

“Are you sure?” said Jerry. “It’s the coffin we picked out.” 

“The coffin is right,” said the director. “I just put the wrong body in it.” 

The man operating the coffin-lowering machine raised the coffin back out of the grave. When it was fully out, the director went to it and threw open the lid.  

There in the coffin lay Jerry’s father. 

“Who is it,” said Jerry’s mother, who was blind and needed Jerry to see things for her. “Who’s in there. Is it him?” 

“It’s him,” said Jerry. 

“Oh my God,” said the director, touching his temples with his fingers. “This is a nightmare. I can’t believe this is happening.” 

“What’s the problem?” said Jerry. “It’s the right body in the right coffin.” 

The problem, said the director, was that the mixup was even worse than he’d thought. Jerry’s father was in the right coffin, which meant his fishing buddies must have gotten swapped. 

No one said anything. The wind noisily ruffled everyone’s trouser legs. In the distance Jerry heard a cable pinging against a flagpole. 

Then the director said, “Well, let’s just go check.” 

So they all returned to the gravesite they’d just come from. The grave had been filled in. Atop the grave stood a hump of black dirt. Jerry wondered why the hump of dirt was as short as it was, why it wasn’t the approximate height of a coffin. The gravedigger sat in the miniature backhoe, looking at his phone. The light from the phone was bright white. 

“You pick this day to be on time?!” cried the director.  

The director turned to the mourners and told them the gravedigger was never on time. He was a drunk. He was going through a messy divorce. Sometimes graves lay open for hours before he got around to them. The gravedigger seemed not to mind these things being said about him. 

“So what do we do now,” said Jerry’s mother. 

“We could check on Bobby,” said Jerry. “Bobby wasn’t buried. He’s in the Cooney family crypt. If he’s in the right coffin, and my father’s in the right coffin, that means everyone is where they should be.” 

So they marched to the Cooney family crypt. Jerry felt like he was in a movie someone was rewinding in the VCR. 

At the Cooney family crypt the director produced an enormous metal key that had gone green with age. Jerry knew this meant the key was made of copper. He imagined how it had looked when this crypt was first built, before any of the Cooneys had died. It must have looked like a new penny. Now all the Cooneys were dead, and here it was, the color of pistachio ice cream.  

Once they’d opened the crypt, they faced a new problem; how to get Bobby’s coffin out of its cubby and onto flat ground where they could open it and get to the bottom of this. 

“I’ll help,” said a man. 

“I’ll help too,” said another man. 

“So will I,” said a third. 

“Two is plenty,” the director said to the third man.  

The third man looked sad to be left out. 

Under the director’s guidance the two chosen men heaved a coffin out of the crypt and laid it on the ground. 

“I will now open this coffin,” the director announced.  

“Which way are you facing,” said Jerry’s mother to Jerry. 

“I’m facing the coffin,” said Jerry. 

“Gerald Peter Holmes, turn around this instant,” she said. 

Jerry wished he could explain to her that his soul was not a morbid soul, as she feared it was. If anything his soul was angelic. It was just always worse to not see. The real world was never as bad as his imagination. Except for when he’d had to look at his father’s body in the county morgue on the night of the accident. That was something he wished he hadn’t seen. For the first time in his life he’d wished his mother wasn’t blind. 

The coffin had two lids, an upper and a lower, like Dutch doors. Slowly, theatrically, the director opened the upper lid. 

Inside was a skeleton in a dusty suit, its mouth open, like it was saying ha ha ha. 

“Jesus,” said the man who’d been left out. “It’s dad.” 

Everyone contemplated this skeleton awhile. Then the director gave a discreet signal and the men—all three of them this time—put this coffin back in and took an identical but less dusty coffin out. 

“We should have noticed that,” said the director. 

With less ceremony, the director opened the coffin’s upper lid. This time it was Bobby Cooney in there. He was in his tackle vest. The vest had his flies pinned up and down it. To Jerry they looked like the feathered ends of cat toys.  

“I don’t understand,” said the director, looking down at Bobby. “I know I made a mistake.” 

“Maybe that was the mistake,” someone said. “Thinking you’d made a mistake when you hadn’t.” 

Now the two men put Bobby back into his family’s crypt. The director closed the crypt door and locked it with the green copper key and slowly they all returned to Jerry’s father’s grave. The coffin was still on the coffin-lowering machine, awaiting them. This coffin had just the one lid, about the dimensions of a pantry door, and it was still open. Jerry saw the tip of his father’s nose rising above the coffin’s edge, just the tip, and that nose tip was somehow even worse than the whole body had been that night at the morgue. Jerry shut his eyes and saw a monster with a vagina for a mouth and one eye set in a mess of exposed cartilage so he opened his eyes again. Someone had shut his father’s coffin lid. The man operating the machine had hit the button. The coffin was going down into the grave. 

“What’s happening,” said Jerry’s mother when the coffin was all the way down there.  

“It’s over,” said Jerry. 

That night Jerry and his mother ate dinner at a table that was in the kitchen. Previously this table had been for impromptu meals that didn’t warrant sitting at the big dining-room table. A quick sandwich, a toaster waffle before school, etc. But they both agreed it felt wrong to sit at the big dining-room table without Jerry’s father. So they ate at the kitchen table.  

“Not forever,” said Jerry’s mother. “Just for now.” 

For the rest of Jerry’s life, whenever he thought about his childhood, he saw that kitchen table before he saw anything else. It was square with pointy corners and scalloped edges, sort of like a saltine cracker. Since the designers assumed people would use a tablecloth, they’d put no effort into the tabletop’s aesthetic. It was just a beige spongy surface with rips in it. Inside the rips was a foam the color of yellow cake.  

Jerry could see all this without trying to. But he had to think hard to see the dining-room table, where he’d eaten far more memorable meals. So many of his memories turned out that way. Of his father’s funeral, he didn’t even remember the tip of his father’s nose sticking up from the coffin edge. What he remembered was that green copper key, and the way his heart had leapt insanely at the word “mistake,” and the gravedigger’s phone with its bright white light.