“I'm afraid this is all I can offer, Mr. Franklin.”
Franklin Tosh twirled the urn in his hands. “It's not what I was looking for, Mr. Clemont.”
Franklin thought the urn a disappointing memorial as he set it upon the kitchen table. The finish looked like silver, but Franklin knew from touch that it was made of inexpensive plastic. Franklin frowned. The urn was smaller than the pots sitting upon the windowsill where Sam loved attending to her tulips. Those clay pots in the window would crowd the urn. People strolling along the sidewalk outside of his window would likely fail to notice the receptacle of Sam's ashes. Franklin decided it better to sprinkle her ashes in a pot, from which Sam's favorite tulips might grow.
“And none of the cemeteries would accept Sam?”
Mr. Clement patiently shook his head. He recognized that people did not always think straight when passing through periods of mourning.
“They have to consider the sentiments of the community, Fanklin. The cemeteries do not want to set a precedent by accepting a synthetic. I know it must be hard for you to see it. I know how much Sam meant to you. But you must try to understand why the cemeteries do not want to provide her with a plot.”
“It's because they think the Lord didn't create her,” Franklin replied.
Franklin had never been one to brood upon matters of spirituality and theology. He had never desired to debate how many angels might fit upon the head of a pin. He felt resentful. He resented that those who professed a day when their messiah would return to raise the dead would not allow his Sam to participate in that glorious resurrection. Franklin's hand slapped the kitchen table. He knew the faithful in Portis shunned him, for he had chosen to love a thing instead of a woman.
“I won't pretend that faith has nothing to do with it, Franklin,” Mr. Clemont answered. “Observances for the dead are vital rituals for people. My business is serving to those rituals. You must see why I cannot afford to offend my community's belief.”
“I wouldn't ask you to, Mr. Clemont,” Franklin sighed. “Are you sure you wouldn't like a sandwhich or more tea?”
“No thanks, Franklin. I must get back to my office.”
Mr. Clemont refrained from the cucumber sandwiches, the chicken casserole and the cookies and led himself out of Mr. Tosh's front door. Franklin shambled in the funeral proprietor's wake and slumped into his living room recliner.
“I made too much food, Sam,” Franklin spoke to the empty room. “The appetites never arrived.”
Franklin wondered if he had cooked so much food to distract his thoughts from the image of Sam sprawled, faceless, upon the linoleum floor of Diekemper's Grocery and Goods. Perhaps he had cooked so much because the kitchen had been a room in which he and Sam spent so much time. Regardless, too much food rested on his living room tables and kitchen counters. His refrigerator could not hold so many meals.
He had hoped for more company. James and Frannie Kellerman, neighbors across the street, knocked upon his door earlier that afternoon to offer a jello mold and picture frame to show their sympathies. They had refused to step inside. Franklin's investment planner Charles Wood mailed flowers. Roger Ubank stopped by very briefly to say he would miss seeing Sam's white tulips growing in Franklin's front window. He failed to find a minister who would share with him some insight into the nature of death. Those he called told Franklin that the Bible held no pages nor room for whatever chemical process composed the synthetic soul. Franklin's spirits sagged as he leaned into his recliner's cushions. He realized he would be eating cucumber sandwiches for weeks.
Franklin's fingers strayed to the remote control. His red eyes stared at the screen, but his mind registered none of the commercials for the latest model of mechanical dog or self-navigating car. He had never felt so old. He had never felt so empty.
He paced throughout his small, two bedroom home. Already, he wrestled to recall the color of Sam's eyes. The image of Sam laying dead in the produce aisle would not leave his mind. He fought to remember how her hair once glowed, but he could only summon sights of blood-matted locks. Franklin's heart panicked. Had he taken so many of Sam's graces for granted that he could not remember any of her charms only a few days after her killing?
Franklin ran into his bedroom and removed his fifty-year old, senior yearbook from the bottom drawer of his wardrobe. A blue ribbon, a memento of that school year's Future Business Leaders of America field trip, marked the only page he ever turned to. He had won that second place ribbon with Sophie Carter, and it bookmarked that photo from which originated all of Franklin's concepts of beauty during so many years that followed.
The color photograph of seventeen-year old Sophie Carter filled an entire page. Sophie roller-skated across the gym floor during an annual blood drive. The picture caught her in the middle of a twirl, flakes of silver and gold sparkling in the plastic wheels of her skates. Franklin's heart fluttered. His Samantha had been molded in that image of young Sophie Carter. He no longer had the resources to summon life a second time from that photograph; and however close a second copy of that page's Sophie Carter would come to that seventeen-year old young woman skating across the gym floor, Franklin doubted he could copy Samantha's soul. He had done everything to preserve the girl who skated upon that yearbook page, and he wondered if the pursuit was noble or shameful.
Franklin now yearned for two lost loves as he gazed at that page's photograph. Sophie Carter's auburn hair fanned outward in her twirl's momentum. Sophie's green eyes glowed for the camera, and her smile reminded Franklin of that joyous optimism possessed by the young. Her skin was that color of sun that still quickened Franklin's heart, a tan of softball games and tractor rides. She wore short, and tight, purple shorts that accentuated the curve of her young hips. Franklin's eye followed that curve along other graces of Sophie's figure until his gaze stopped, as it always did, upon her high neck. Franklin sobbed. He counted that glossy yearbook page his finest treasure. Only it now brought the pain of two lost loves instead of the pain of one. The terrible thought came to him that he should set that picture to flame.
He had never stopped yearning for that seventeen-year old Sophie Carter. No matter what how Sophie changed through the years, no matter what personality Sophie crafted, not matter the coming events that shaped her life, no matter the loves Sophie Carter might have come to feel, Franklin Tosh could not let go of that image of her trapped in a camera flash. Franklin never learned to accept that truth that time transformed all things, that one moment could never be the same as the moment just before. And so no matter what hurts Sophie's life would have to bear, no matter what wrinkles or pains came with her years, Franklin Tosh always thought Sophie was that girl spinning upon that yearbook page he marked with a blue ribbon.
And when Sophie Carter never reciprocated the love Franklin thought he could offer her, no matter that Franklin had to watch other men leave and hurt her, Franklin Tosh gave a copy of that photograph to the Creighton Dynamic to communicate what he desired in his Samantha.
“I don't want them to make another one of you, Sam. I don't care if I have another mountain of money to spend for it.”
Franklin snapped shut that yearbook and wept.
Samantha's ashes arrived two weeks after Mr. Clemont's visit, delivered via standard postage in a cardboard box that waited outside of Franklin's front door. Rolling the daily newspaper into a funnel, Franklin poured those ashes into one of Samantha's clay pots that sat upon the windowsill where Samantha's tulips once grew.
Franklin knew that Portis did not believe Samantha had been a real wife. He realized that his neighbors believed that the Lord could not have blessed a union between a man and an unreal thing. Franklin knew that Portis did not view his loss as much kind of a sacrifice.
But sitting in the dark one night, Franklin Tosh vowed to make sure that no one forgot Samantha. He vowed to make someone pay for what had been taken from him.