Leonard Pack's Funeral

It’s a hot, humid, overcast day in late August and Pearl Pack is preparing to bury her late husband, Leonard Pack. She’s standing at the burial site, along with a minister and five mourners—her sister-in-law Carla, Carla’s husband Bernie, and Bernie’s three brothers Mike, Dale, and Sam. Pearl doesn’t know why Bernie’s brothers are there. She can't remember Leonard ever speaking to them in the three years she was married to him. She would have warned them not to come, but now it’s too late. They are here, and there is nothing she can do about it.

Umbrellas bloom like black mushrooms above the mourners’ heads as rain trickles from the soot-colored sky. The absence of blue lacerations in such a flat gray sky indicates Leonard will be buried on an appropriately gloomy day. Pearl opens her white umbrella dotted with tiny red roses and notices Carla glancing disapprovingly at her. She imagines Carla desperately wants to whisper to her husband: you’re supposed to use only black umbrellas at funerals! Look at her…she can’t do anything right! She always was trash. What Carla doesn’t know is that Pearl’s choice of umbrella is deliberate. Pearl Pack is not mourning or sad. She is not attending the funeral out of love or respect for her dead husband. Pearl Pack is attending Leonard Pack’s burial service simply because she has one more thing to do before summer ends.

The minister stops talking about God and heaven and everlasting life and invites anyone to speak about Leonard. Carla volunteers to be the first one to glorify her brother’s reputation. Pearl hates her sister-in-law, a superficial, arrogant woman as empty and brittle as a discarded cicada shell. Pearl thinks it’s funny that Carla doesn’t know she looks freakish, with her red lipstick bleeding into the wrinkles around her mouth and those thick, black, fake eyelashes looking like furry woolly worms glued to her eyelids.

“My baby brother Leonard was the smartest person I’ve ever known,” Carla says, dabbing the corners of her eyes with a white handkerchief. “He worked very hard and built a successful life for himself. He was a good, good man and husband. His sudden heart attack was such a horrible shock to us. He always seemed energetic and healthy. He never complained about anything.”

Carla chokes back a sob. “Most of all, Leonard took care of the people he loved. He was generous, brilliant, and extraordinarily disciplined. He was my rock when our parents died. I will miss him every day for the rest of my life.” Carla dramatically lays one white lily on top of Leonard’s casket and looks at Pearl, curving her clownish lips into a wan smile.

Leonard was evil, you bitch! Pearl screams silently at Carla. He didn’t die of a heart attack. He died because he was a homicidal sociopath. He died because I killed the bastard.

“Mrs. Pack, would you like to say a few words about your dearly departed husband?”

Pearl nods solemnly at the minister. She knows exactly what she wants to say. She has been rehearsing this speech ever since she began putting toxic amounts of insulin in Leonard’s vodka martinis every night. Leonard may have been smart, but he wasn’t smart enough, she silently tells the mourners encircling her like a murder of pitch-black crows.

Pearl makes eye contact with everyone before speaking. She wants to make sure they are paying attention. She wants them to carefully chew and swallow each word she speaks as if her words were pieces of food and they were starving to death.

“I married Leonard because I loved him. Leonard told me he wanted children before we married, and I believed him. However, that was my first mistake. He lied to me about wanting children, one of the first of many, many lies Leonard would tell me up until his death. Leonard actually hated children, even yours, Carla. He thought Lila and Derrick were spoiled brats who deserved to be whipped until they bled. He told me repeatedly he would have loved to beat your children. You didn’t know that, did you, Carla? But, you wouldn’t have believed me if I had told you, so I never did. Anyway, Leonard’s sadistic streak didn’t end with hating children. He hated people, too. Leonard said he had always wanted to kill someone since he was 15 years old, just to know what it was like to take another person’s life.”

Thunder rumbles in the distance. Lightning briefly flashes. The mourners stare at Pearl with the horrified expressions of rabbits transfixed by vulture talons descending on them. Pearl notes with satisfaction that Carla’s mouth is hanging open, and her face is whiter than Leonard’s cosmetically disguised face. Pea-sized hail jumps up and down in the thick, wet grass. It’s so quiet that Pearl can hear hailstones hitting the leaves of nearby trees.

The minister clears his throat loudly, nervously. “Mrs. Pack, are you alright? Do you want to go back to the church, perhaps?”

“Leonard verbally and emotionally abused me,” Pearl continues, raising her voice to make it clear she would not tolerate further interruptions. “Whenever I threatened to leave him, he asked me if I knew what the barrel of a gun tasted like. He told me he would bash my skull in with a hammer. He said he would tie me to a chair and pull my teeth out with a pair of pliers. I was terrified that if I went to the police, they would do nothing except talk to him, or put him in jail for a couple of days, and then let him go. You see, Leonard was a sociopath, a master manipulator, a person who imitated normal behavior to trick everyone. Inside Leonard lived an evil, murderous soul who cared only about satisfying the most reprehensible of desires—to kill innocent people.”

The minister attempts to speak again. “Mrs. Pack, please…I think you need medical assistance. You must stop this right now. Let me call an ambulance.”

“Shut up!” Pearl yells at him. “This is the last thing I have to do before summer ends, and goddammit, I’m going to do it.”

Pearl revels in the horrified expressions of the mourners, a sense of euphoria almost but not quite surpassing the exhilaration she felt when she checked Leonard’s pulse and felt nothing. Carla looks to be on the verge of hysterically and dramatically fainting.

“Leonard had high blood pressure and diabetes. He ate nothing but fast food and drank alcohol every night. He said alcohol helped him think logically about committing a mass murder and getting away with it. A few weeks before he died, Leonard told me he was making plans to kill as many people as possible. He said he wanted to shoot people in the head so that he could watch their brains splatter all over the ground. He said if I told anyone, he’d make sure my brains would mix with the brains of his victims.”

“So,” Pearl says matter-of-factly. “I killed Leonard. I killed Leonard to stop him. I spiked the three vodka martinis I made him every night with toxic amounts of insulin. That’s why he died of a heart attack. Or, so they think.”

The mourners collectively gasp, clamp their hands over their mouths, and step away from Pearl. Carla is apoplectic. She is half-growling, half-screaming at Pearl, like a rabid animal snarling at its hallucinated enemies. Watery mucous trickles from Carla’s nostrils, spilling over her lips and off her chin. Spittle mixes with her red lipstick. She looks like she is dying from a hemorrhagic disease.

Carla’s screams sound like tires screeching on a long stretch of highway. “How could you DO such a thing! You—you killed my brother! YOU KILLED LEONARD? He’s none of those things you said he was—NONE OF THEM! Oh my God, I can’t believe you murdered Leonard. I always knew you were a witch, a phony, but I didn’t know you were insane. I’m calling the police right now! You little bitch! I’ll make sure you get the electric chair!”

Pearl Pack feels insubstantial, weightless, like she is effortlessly levitating. Her heart beats with the repetitive indifference of a metronome. There is a noise in her head that sounds like elephants stampeding in the jungle. Molecules are resigning from their predetermined structures. The universe is revealing itself to Pearl as mercilessly karmic yet oddly malleable.

Pearl Pack pulls one of Leonard’s handguns, a .22 revolver, out of her purse and shoots six times. The bodies fall like puppets. Pools of blood form under each body, spreading slowly over the green, wet grass. Carla is lying on her back, gurgling and coughing, moving her arms and legs around like a beetle frantically trying to flip itself over. Pearl wonders if she would put Carla out of her misery if she had any bullets left. She can’t decide. Everyone else seems dead, or at least unconscious and close to death. Pearl is certain they will all be dead by the time the police arrive.

Later, in the interrogation room, Pearl Pack is asked why she killed those people at the graveside service. She glances at the gun in the detective’s holster strapped around his waist, then at his expressionless, brown eyes. Pearl realizes he doesn’t really care why she committed murder. He’s just doing his job.

“I had to. Summer is almost over, and it was the last thing I had to do.”

The detective leans forward, raises an eyebrow, and slightly shakes his head. “You present a motive for killing your husband. Whether it’s true or not is something a jury must decide. So far, we’ve found no evidence in your home that Leonard was planning a mass murder. Nothing. So, why did you shoot those people? What had they done to you?”

Pearl Pack briefly considers the detective’s question but decides not to answer it. Instead, she wonders if she had a loaded gun right now, would she shoot the detective or let him live? She can’t decide. Some decisions are simply so much harder to make than others.