Kat

Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI

by Nathaniel Berry

Kat comes back to Adrian only for the funerals.

The first was her grandmother’s. She died during Kat’s freshman year at Notre Dame. The reception was at Wagley’s: an orange-brick and white plaster-columned funeral home out on 223, in the parking lot of the Family Video, where Jet’s used to be. Ads for Wagley’s used to run on local TV: serene, elderly couples sat with their newspaper, overcome with relief at the professional and affordable services their loved ones would soon have the opportunity to purchase. The Wagleys are wonderful, a woman with silver hair said, I think they were made for this profession. The home has cream wallpaper and mesmerizing maroon and white lattice carpet. Partitions make the rooms larger or smaller, depending on how big a hole the decedent left in the world behind them.

For the service, Kat’s mom asked her to play Pachelbel’s Canon on the piano, and Kat asked me to play with her on the violin. I squeaked through, mostly sight-reading—Kat hit every note, in spite of whatever she was feeling. She always hit every note. 

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The second funeral was during her senior year at Notre Dame, when her old boyfriend, Micah, killed himself. Kat knew Micah better than anybody; she saw a side of him that was sweet and selfless, a depth behind the wall of bro-y joviality that he kept between him and the rest of the world.

Micah and I hooked up in the band room, Kat told me over Gchat, via the study hall computer.

What do you like about Micah? I typed back. 

He has nice calves.

Kat would find a reason to like anybody, and she was everybody’s friend in those days: the hipsters and the ska-punks; the nerdy AP set; brooding, lonely boys in whom she always tried to see the good. 

She excelled effortlessly in AP science and math classes that I didn’t have the attention span for, but we took French together, where she spoke with perfect fluency in an unapologetic, Southern Michigan twang. She got a 36 on the ACT, in a clean-sweep of all categories, and went to Notre Dame on a full-ride, matriculating anonymously into its echoing, stadium lecture halls.

Kat got fifteen minutes alone at Micah’s funeral. They cleared Wagley’s for her, because Micah’s best friend isn’t allowed to be in the same room with Kat as a condition of his parole. Due mostly to this, Kat and Micah hadn’t seen each other in years, but they’d been alone together before, near this very spot. Micah worked for the Wagleys one summer as a custodian, vacuuming and featherdusting after close, and Kat drove her brother’s Isuzu Rodeo there on summer nights and parked between the dumpsters and the trees. In Wagley’s, the air conditioner was running too strong and it was freezing, with the place emptied of the living for the night. She and Micah clung to each other in the coat closet when Micah was still warm, when his cheeks still flushed and his blood still ran. 

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Kat’s mother lived for years with an illness that made her see the world from the seat of an electric wheelchair. She knew everyone, and like her daughter, she was everybody’s friend. Her husband was a contractor and landlord, and they lived out on Bent Oak, in a bungalow built into the side of a hill, so that the basement opened out onto tall-grass fields. She had a son in addition to Kat—and both of them snuck their friends in through the basement, or snuck out to meet them in the cicada-screaming moonlight. Before she got sick, Kat’s mom played softball with the Adrian Public School teachers. After, she made long phone calls to her siblings, scattered across the country, and invited Kat’s friends to extravagant homemade dinners that I was always too shy, or too rude, to attend.

For the third funeral, Kat’s family came from across the country. Kat, who has more reason than most to leave Adrian, moved West—married a nice boy from Illinois, settled down with a dog and a masters’ degree into a good job at a hospital. We gathered in a double-room at Wagley’s, drank Slivovitz from shot-sized solo cups. Told old stories about Kat’s ancestors who came to Lenawee County from Bulgaria.

Kat’s mom went suddenly. She went in her sleep. Kat’s dad might leave and move out West too, and then he’ll be one of the funeral people like his children: returning only for the funerals of distant cousins, former business partners, old friends.

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If you grow up here and leave, Adrian becomes a place for funerals. And there are no better places. There are no lovelier cemeteries. Oakwood, with its gentle hills and crumbling mausoleums. St. Mary’s by Drager Middle School, where the graves are always covered with cut flowers. St. John’s, out by Sienna Heights—that old pine grove where they buried the abolitionist and feminist hero Laura Haviland, on whose grave the women in my family stuck their ‘I Voted’ stickers in November of 2016.

When Kat lived here, we would drive out to the cemeteries on warm nights during summer break, full of Three-Cheese Chicken Penne from Applebee’s, or Tricolor Tortellini from Sal’s. We’d drive out to the cemeteries in her brother’s Rodeo, park somewhere secluded, and watch the stars come into focus in the purple night. We complained about our teachers, pined for our lovers, scoffed at our enemies. We dreamed about worlds beyond Adrian—what countries we’d travel to, what languages we’d learn, what stories and poems we’d write. And the cemeteries were perfect then, for that kind of boundless hope for the future, because the headstones were blank with names we did not know.