The Sixth Pallbearer by Andrew Careaga

Where’s number six, the funeral director asks the young men before him. They shrug in unison. He’s always running late, one says. Yeah, but you’d think he’d be here by now, today of all days, says another, and pulls out his cellphone and taps the screen.

Across town, a text message pings the sixth pallbearer’s phone, which sits on the mother’s kitchen table, where the sixth pallbearer sits nursing the morning’s fourth beer. He ignores the phone and message, just like he ignored changing from the gray sweatpants and t-shirt he’d slept in into something more suitable for a funeral. Just like he ignored showering and shaving and brushing his teeth.

The phone screen dims as the sixth pallbearer pulls beer number five from a paper bag as the movie plays in his foggy mind. The movie has been on repeat since the crash. It’s the movie about what could and should have been. How his friend’s death could have been avoided if only the sixth pallbearer had stopped his friend from staggering out of that bar and into his Malibu. How he should have dropped his pool cue to hustle after his friend to stop him from speeding off drunk and alone and into the abyss of that rocky ridge.

Two days ago, the dead man’s wife called and asked if he would be a pallbearer. You were his closest friend, she said, over the whimper of the cocker spaniel his friend loved so much. He thought so highly of you, she said, over the sobs of their infant son, who wailed like a pedal steel. It would be an honor, he’d told her.

He shakes his head to try to pause that mental movie. He yanks the last beer from its plastic ring, and another film, a new one, starts to play. A preview of coming attractions. Of his mother coming home to find him right where she left him, right there at her table, if not passed out under it, still in t-shirt and sweatpants, still unshaven and unshowered, face splotched and swollen. The one where she steps into the kitchen, fists on hips, her face projecting revulsion, her voice sharp with bile and rebuke.

The sixth pallbearer stumbles to his feet, tells himself that’s one movie that will never play. He trips out into the blazing blue summer day.

Across town a hearse leads a solemn procession to the cemetery. Cars with high beams on in sunny daylight weave their way through the solemn streets.

The sixth pallbearer stumbles to his pickup, turns the ignition and pulls away while the fasten-seat-belt chime dings. He drives away from his mother’s house, from town, from the funeral procession, from life, and drives toward a place where the highway narrows and curves and rises in the hills high above the rocky ridges, and then he floors it.