Earnest Bliss

Chapter 1

Black has never suited Eleanor.

It's too grim, too maudlin, too reminiscent of an unfortunate pre-teen goth phase. It's a colour she's rarely worn; instead she's filled her wardrobe with vibrant secondhand outfits in pastels and patterns, with the singular exception of a singular black dress. It'd been a graduation gift from her mother, purchased from the Bay Department Store in downtown Toronto, because "there's always an occasion for a little black dress, darling."

Neither of them had imagined, giggling in the high-ceilinged dressing room, that the occasion would be her own funeral.

According to the death certificate, Henry and Rose Martin died at 2:03a.m. on a stormy February night at the North York Hospital. It would take another 8 hours before Eleanor found out. She'd been out all night, celebrating the end of another soul-sucking internship, and spent most of that evening passed out on her friend Kaitlyn Marlowe's couch. Her phone, very much an afterthought, had been crammed in her purse and her purse, in turn, had been forgotten in Kait's bathroom. By the time she found her phone, she'd missed three calls from the hospital and one from a longtime family friend, and at 10:32a.m. Eleanor Martin's life was changed for ever.

In the weeks since, things have been a blur. At just twenty-three years old, Eleanor has no experience planning funerals and just enough knowledge of ask her dad's friend Shaun for help with the tricky legalities that come with dying.

Even the day of the funeral, she finds herself frazzled and running behind. She writes the eulogy on the subway, next to a man who reeks of weed playing ska music through his phone, and arrives late to the funeral home.

Ebner's Funeral Home is a tiny little building tucked away near the outskirts of Toronto's downtown. It was the cheapest option Eleanor could find that didn't verge into "potentially illegal", so outside of the long commute she has little to complain about. The small parking lot outside is already half-full with cars; the only one Eleanor recognizes is the beat-up 1998 Ford Lincoln Navigator that Ruth had bought second-hand from a guy out in Peterborough.

Her friends, Kaitlyn and Ruth, are waiting outside in heavy winter coats. Kaitlyn pulls her into an awkward one-armed hug, and Ruth pats her on the shoulder sympathetically.  She's known both of them since university, back when the two were reluctant lab partners and not a couple. 

"Almost everyone is here, I think," Kaitlyn says. "The director is ready to start whenever you are."

Eleanor is the only one speaking at the service; it isn't as if she has other family to ask. Her parents had been staunchly tight-lipped about their extended family, if they had any. Obviously Eleanor had questions about the whole thing, since all her friends had a grandparent or an uncle or something, but her parents had always brushed it off. "You're all the family we need," her mother would say. Her father, instead, would draw out a fantastical and fictional family tree, connecting the Martin family with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Lancelot.

They worked, just the three of them, in their own little unit. But now it's just Eleanor, and her hastily written eulogy.

Eleanor clears her throat. The funeral parlor has filled up, a sea of faces both familiar and not. Eleanor focuses on her notes instead. "My parents didn't talk a lot about their life before they moved to Toronto." The only hint they'd had a live before Toronto were the accents: her mother posh and lilting, and her father's northern and gruff.  

"I'd ask, and they'd say 'it doesn't matter' or 'it was boring', and then they'd tell me 'Our lives are here'. And for a long time I though they were lying, but now I actually think they meant it. Dad taught so many Cabbagetown kids piano he could have formed his own school, and mom spent so much of her free time trying to tend the flowers in Allan Gardens that the city formally told her off. She, uh, had the warning framed and hung it in the living room."