I'm a paid mourner. By the hour, no kid-or-senior surcharge.
The Sutton-Marchand heir's fiancée drove her Porsche off the I-10 causeway last Tuesday. Beau Sutton-Marchand IV cut me a check the size of a starter home and asked me to keen for her at Lake Lawn.
I wailed the rosary off the priest. Half the Garden District wept into their black umbrellas. Beau Sutton-Marchand's eyes went red over a closed casket.
After the graveside, he caught me at the side gate of the mausoleum.
"From now on," he said, "you cry for who I say to cry for."
The next morning he drove me to a wicker wheelchair on a Prytania Street verandah. The girl in the chair had Charlotte Sutton's face, line for line — alive, pale, the inside of her arm a constellation of needle tracks.
He pressed a second check into my palm.
"Cry for her like she's already dead."
I folded the check into my keening sash and told him what my grandma taught me.
"For live ones, it's double."
He laughed, cold, and agreed.
So I knelt on the verandah tile and opened my throat for her — and the girl who was supposed to be already dead leaned forward and said, low enough that only I could hear:
"Don't cry for me. Cry for him."
My name's Remy Lecroix. Working name. The card I hand out says Lecroix Lament, Professional Mourner and Keener, By the Hour or By the Job.
Grandma Mae says I was born for the work. Most people cry because they're sad. I cry because I'm on the clock.
Three seconds to glassy eyes. Five seconds to first tear. Ten and the grandsons start kneeling for the casket. Twenty and a deadbeat son will Venmo what he owes mid-eulogy.
The parlors in Treme call me the Undertaker. Not because I bury anybody. Because once I open my throat over a coffin, the room buries itself.
The Suttons came for me on a Wednesday. I was working an eighty-year-old in a parish funeral home off North Claiborne, three grown sons slap-fighting in the side parlor over their daddy's hardware-store deeds. I knelt at the casket and said, loud enough to crack the cheap fluorescents, Daddy, open your eyes, look at 'em — they can't even let you ride out of here clean.
The three of them dropped to their knees inside of fifteen seconds. The eldest signed a check to the youngest right there on the casket lid. I billed the surviving widow on the way out.
Outside on the sidewalk a Black-Creole man in a charcoal suit and white pocket square was waiting beside a Lincoln. Gold ring, no wedding band, a leather portfolio under his arm. He handed me a card embossed in copperplate.
Auguste DuPree. Counsel — Office of Sutton-Marchand Holdings.
"Miss Lecroix," he said. "Mr. Sutton-Marchand would like to engage your services for a graveside."
"What grade?"
"The highest."
I held up my hand and counted on five fingers.
"Fifty thousand. Half-hour graveside. Overage billed in fifteen-minute blocks. Custom dirges, separate line item. If I'm asked to faint, you cover urgent care."
Mr. DuPree didn't blink.
"Five hundred."
I waited a beat.
He slid a one-page agreement across the hood of the Lincoln. Sutton-Marchand letterhead, watermarked.
"One condition, Miss Lecroix. You make every soul in that cemetery believe Charlotte Sutton was the love of his life."
I signed it standing up, against the windshield.
In this trade you don't ask too much. Especially not about rich-people funerals.
You ask too much, you end up booked for your own.
Charlotte Sutton's funeral is at Lake Lawn Metairie, on the cemetery's private side.
It's raining the kind of warm Gulf rain you can't dress for. The black umbrellas have already crowded out the view by the time my driver lets me off at the chapel road. Two valets in livery, three Sutton-Marchand security men in earpieces, a tent over the grave the size of a small church.
The talk under the umbrellas finds me on the way in.
"They sure she's really in there?"
"Single car, I-10 causeway. They said the body wasn't whole."
"That boy's gonna lose his mind. Chased her since Newcomb."
I take my place at the head of the grave. Charlotte's portrait sits on an easel beside the coffin — black-and-white, society pages cut. Light eyes. A small smile that promises nothing.
Beau Sutton-Marchand stands at the coffin's edge. Black suit, no umbrella. His hand is on the lid, knuckles gone white. His face is the kind of empty that costs something to maintain.
Mr. DuPree appears at my shoulder.
"Whenever you're ready, Miss Lecroix."
I kneel on the wet astroturf. I drop my head. By the time I lift it again my eyes are already wet, and the first tear has already hit the marble surround.
"Miss Charlotte — "
The first word lands and the tent goes still.
I keen her young heart. I keen her shy love and her unspoken promise. I keen the road she was on when she died, racing to meet the man who is standing six feet from where she'll go in the ground. The lines were prepped for me by DuPree's office.
I add the line they didn't write.
"You said you weren't afraid of pain, sugar — when that glass came through the door, did you scream his name?"
Beau Sutton-Marchand's hand closes on the coffin lid. The wood gives a quiet crack under his palm.
Behind me, women have started to sob.
"He's right here, Charlotte. He's standing close enough to touch you and he can't reach your hand."
His eyes go red. For the first time since I've been on the job he looks like a man, not a portrait.
For about thirty seconds I think he's just another sad rich boy who didn't get the girl.
I wail another four minutes. I finish on a Cajun dirge my grandma taught me, the one with no English words. I stand. I wipe my face. I smile the smile a tradesman smiles after a clean job.
"Thank you, Mr. Sutton-Marchand. The balance can be remitted to the contract account on file."
He doesn't move.
The mausoleum's side gate clicks shut behind me a minute later, and when I look up he's already there.
"You cried well."
I keep the professional smile. "Thank you, sir. The balance — "
"From now on." He steps closer. The shadow of the gate falls over me. "You cry for who I say to cry for."
I hear myself laugh once. It comes out wrong.
"Excuse me?"
He doesn't repeat himself. He just stands there, close enough that I can smell wet wool and bourbon. Close enough that the whole rest of this conversation is going to happen against a wall.
"I tell you who to cry for," he says. "And you cry."
My back is against the wrought-iron gate. The metal is cold through my dress.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand. I keen for a living. I'm not on retainer to anybody. I don't do monthly."
He produces a folded document from inside his jacket. New letterhead, fresh ink. Three pages. The retainer at the top reads three million dollars a year. Exclusive. On-call. The non-disclosure clause runs two pages by itself, and the breach penalty has so many zeros I count twice.
I fold it back up.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand, I'd like to live long enough to spend that."
He smiles without teeth.
"Miss Lecroix. Your grandmother is at Slidell Memorial Care, second floor. Her bill runs eighty-two hundred a month, give or take. The Sutton-Marchand Foundation has been covering the deficit for the last eighteen months. Did she tell you?"
The smile I've been holding goes flat.
He sets a photograph on the gate's lower rail.
Grandma Mae in the wicker rocker on the nursing-home porch. The Mardi Gras T-shirt quilt I stitched her two Christmases ago is across her knees — I can see the green-and-gold Endymion square, the purple Bacchus square, the gray Tulane sleeve panel. She is squinting at the sun. She looks small.
I look at him.
"You threatening me?"
"I'm telling you."
"There's a word for telling somebody what to do with their grandmother. The word is threat."
His face doesn't change.
"You have options, Miss Lecroix. You can take the contract. Or I can find a less talkative provider for her care, and you can find out what happens when the Foundation stops covering the deficit on a working-class woman's nursing bill."
My hand finds the inside of my keening sash. The contract is shaking a little. So is my hand. I make both of them stop.
I take the pen he's holding out.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand. I have rules."
"I'm listening."
"Crying for the dead is honest." I sign the first page. "Crying for the living is theft from the soul."
He doesn't say anything.
I sign the second.
"For the living, it's double."
He looks at me for the first time the way you look at a person and not a tool.
"You don't scare easy."
I cap the pen.
"I scare," I say. "That's why I price it up front."
The next morning Beau Sutton-Marchand drives me through the Audubon Place gate.
The guard in the booth doesn't ask for ID. He sees the Yukon, he sees Beau, he lifts the bar. There are exactly seven private streets in New Orleans where the parish police don't drive without permission, and this is the only one inside the city limits.
The Sutton compound is the third house on the left. White columns. Black-shuttered. Wisteria on the verandah that has been pruned since 1894.
Charlotte's white mourning wreath is still on the front door. The verandah is empty. There's no funeral altar inside — no candles, no flowers, no priest. The hallway smells like Pine-Sol and money.
We pass a shut door. Behind it I can hear a Waterford tumbler shatter against a wall.
A woman's voice, raw enough to scrape paint: I am not her.
Beau opens the door.
She is sitting in a wicker wheelchair by the window. The light is doing her no favors. She has Charlotte's face — the same eyes, the same mouth, the same line of the brow — but Charlotte's face in a photograph after someone has bled the color out of it. Her hair is loose. Her left wrist is bare to the elbow and stippled all over with bruises around the antecubital vein. There's a port scar at her collarbone, the puckered white circle of a long-term vascular access. A crocheted lap blanket is across her knees, fringed in the same cream linen.
Her eyes are the difference. Spiky, not soft. A knife that hasn't been sharpened — won't slice, but will dent something.
Beau stops at the chair.
"Cordelia. Quit it."
She lifts her water tumbler and throws it at his face.
The glass clips his right brow. It shatters at my feet. A thread of blood draws down his temple, into the white collar of his shirt.
He doesn't move.
Mr. DuPree is suddenly behind me. He's brought a second envelope.
"Miss Lecroix. Her sister." A pause. "Charlotte's twin."
Got it. The dead beloved. The heir gone half mad. A living girl with the same face, kept in a chair on the verandah.
Lifetime movie. Hallmark Saturday afternoon. Every Wattpad mafia romance I've thumbed past. This is the part where the keener pities the wheelchair girl, gets her heart broken by the bad rich boy, and ends up in a bayou with her hands tied.
Hard pass.
Beau holds the envelope out.
"Cry for her."
The check inside is for two hundred thousand. I read it twice.
"Cry for her like she's already dead."
Cordelia Sutton's face goes a shade whiter.
She looks straight at him. "You finally quit pretending."
He doesn't look at her. He looks at me.
"Start."
I kneel down on the verandah tile in front of her chair. Trade habit — observe the body before you open your throat.
Two broken fingernails. A bruise the shape of a thumb on the side of her hand. The crocheted blanket has slipped at the fringe. Underneath it, on the right ankle, where a lap blanket on a chair-bound woman should not show anything but a slipper, there is a steel cuff. Two inches wide. A small vendor stamp on the outside: Riverbend Health Equipment / Patient Restraint, Series 4.
That's not a blanket clip. That's a numbered restraint.
It's not protection. It's a chain.
My chest does something — drops a half inch on the inside, the way it does at gigs where the family has done something nobody was supposed to know about.
I pull my phone out of the keening sash. I unclip the Cash App QR code from the side of the case.
"For the living, sir, it's double. As discussed."
Beau's voice has gone cold and clean.
"Double."
"Up front."