She rolled Mrs. Schriever from the cooler and moved her next to the large metal table they used for embalming, which had the proper drain pans and other accessories to make Tess's life easier during the process. As she'd told Cal, Mrs. Schriever had been embalmed the afternoon before, when she'd been brought in. It was always best to do it as close to death as they could because the body started decomposing immediately, and Tess was pleased to see Mrs. Schriever was holding up nicely.
People were always under the impression that embalming preserved their loved ones forever, but it only slowed down decomposition. Everyone eventually ended up as bone and dust, no matter what chemicals flowed through the veins.
It was easier to do hair and makeup on the larger table with the drains because they'd wash her down one more time before applying the makeup, and they'd wash her hair good before drying and styling it. The water would just flow into the drain below the table.
"What's in that thermos?" Tess asked, arching a brow at her mother.
"Orange juice. I'm trying to be healthy."
"Really? Because all I smell is vodka."
"Just a splash," she said, pursing her lips. "Vodka is a vegetable and oranges are fruit. It's like a vitamin juice. Which means I can have chocolate cake for dessert."
It was hard to argue with that kind of logic. "Put my watch back on the table with my keys, please," Tess said. She'd seen her mother pocket the watch and not think twice about it. She had to watch her constantly and always made her empty her purse and pockets before she left to go home.
"It's a lovely watch," Theodora said, smiling dreamily as she took the watch out of her pocket and put it back next to Tess's keys. "I could get a solid seventy-five for it at the Prance and Pawn. There's a Powerball drawing next Wednesday. If you'll front me some cash, I can pick some numbers for you too. We can split it seventy/thirty."
In Theodora's mind, a seventy/thirty split was perfectly reasonable for her taking the trip to the gas station and letting a machine randomly pick five numbers for her.
"I'm good. But I'll see if I can find you a watch for Christmas."
"That'll be nice. And maybe a new set of martini glasses. One of them broke, so I only have three. It's bad luck to have an uneven number."
Tess sighed and focused on the job at hand. Work was the greatest escape there was. Delores's body was covered with a white sheet and she was lying on a blue tarp that had two handles on each side. It was always best to jostle the bodies as little as possible, especially with the elderly because the skin was so thin and fragile. Tess snapped the four carabiners onto each of the tarp handles, and then she hit the switch. She kept her hand on the body to guide it as the pulley system lifted Mrs. Schriever off the gurney and onto the table.
"Lord, I want you to just cremate me," Theodora said. "I'd never want people to see my body looking like that. I'd want them to remember me in all my glory."
"So you've mentioned," Tess said, unhooking Mrs. Schriever and pushing the gurney and pulley system out of the way. Theodora never missed an opportunity to tell this to Tess, over every corpse they worked on together.
"You'd think with all the advanced technology nowadays they could figure out how to stop the aging process. Thank God for plastic surgery."
"You've never had plastic surgery," Tess pointed out.
"No, but I know a doctor who said he'd fix me right up the second I started to notice any sagging. I've got his number listed in my emergency contacts." Theodora snuck another drink of her vitamin juice and then said, "How much are you paying me? You know I don't like working on the dead. It gives me the willies. And I had to turn away a couple of clients for this. You know how things start to ramp up before school starts."
"Fifty dollars, like always," Tess said.
"You think I could get away with charging fifty dollars at the shop? I mean, it's a spa and salon, so they're getting a full experience, not just a cut and style."
"No, I don't think you could get away with it," Tess told her. "A seventy percent increase in prices probably won't be good for business."
Tess tacked the enlarged picture of Mrs. Schriever to the board so they could look at it for comparison. It was always best to have a recent picture of the deceased so they could make them look as much as possible like the way people remembered them. The only problem was that Mrs. Schriever's family had given her a picture from 1962, complete with a jet-black beehive and blue eye shadow.