No one else is taking them, so he does.

Being around dead bodies isn’t new to him. His father owned this funeral home. And his father before him. Death is a family business.

The community around him is dying. The community: his friends that trusted his grandfather, his father, and him to treat their dead loved ones with love and respect. Death is a local business.

Old and young are dying. The previously ill and the perfectly healthy are dying. He doesn’t watch the actual death, but afterwards, he alone is the one who has to embalm them. Though his body is fully covered, his mask never leaves his face, and his gloves remain firmly on. Touching the body has a certain terror to it, more than it ever has before. It remains unknown if you can catch the virus from a dead body, yet another thing on the list of unknowns that worries him.  He’s the one to organize social-distancing funerals, watching as loved ones of the deceased struggle to come to terms with the fact that they cannot touch their loved one or be near their loved one a final time. He alone is there to face them and welcome them, though they can only drive past him.

He has never had a big staff, but now he is alone. He would not allow others to be exposed. Before, his wife quit her job as a teacher to be his secretary, to help organize funerals as his business grew over the years. His business has never been busier, yet she is home, along with anyone else who could help him. Death is a lonely business.

That is his choice. Their exposure weighs on his mind every day. In caring for his friends, is he exposing his family? They are all there at home.

He has a senior in high school who is sad and scared that she will lose her entire senior year. This illness took away her junior prom, and she’s heartbroken about it. She’s home with him.

He has a junior in college who had to scramble to get home when the virus started. He finished out his year in front of their desktop computer in the basement, under [near?] the fire alarm with dead batteries. He’s home with him.

He has a 24-year-old daughter 3,000 miles away who is terrified of the virus. She’s diabetic and worries every year about getting the flu. Her roommate refused to social distance and stay at home when the stay-at-home orders started, and went back and forth between their house and her boyfriend’s house. He was a waiter who worked through the pandemic. Terrified, his daughter stayed holed up in her room for months, scared to even go down to the kitchen. His wife convinced her to come home, even though his daughter is scared to travel. She is going to be home with him.

But he worries that, with his oldest coming home, he is going to get her sick. He wakes up in a cold sweat each night, with nightmares plaguing him that her body will be the next to arrive at his funeral home.

A 24-year-old girl showed up on his table. She had red, curly hair, which splayed out behind her on the cold metal table. Her skin was pale, tinged yellow. Her lashes lay delicately on her cheeks and he imagined her eyes would open any moment. Though he’d seen body after body, he found himself weeping in his closest, with the scent of embalming fluid filling his nostrils.

When he goes home later, his wife gives him a towel. He takes his clothes off in the backyard. She puts them in a bag and washes them immediately. They are his work clothes, never to be used again for any other reason. They are the only clothes he’s allowed to wear to work, so they are the only ones to be thrown away after.

His wife opens every door for him so that he doesn’t have to touch anything. His daughter and his son stay in their rooms while they wait for him to pass. He showers, thinking about how to know for certain if he was scrubbing enough. He thinks about that thing dentists used to use that would turn plaque black to show kids they weren’t brushing enough.  He wishes something like that existed to show him where the virus lives. Though he’s already scrubbed his body three times over, he is still afraid to sit on the couch with his family in the evening. Instead, he sits on the floor away from them. He is hesitant to even pet the dog when he crawls into his lap.

He knows this fear will only get worse when his oldest arrives home. He knows how much he could never forgive himself if she ended up being the next 24-year-old to grace his table, many years before she should ever be there.

She grew up with a place filled with death as a second home. They all did. A home that he has a hard time imagining ever allowing her or any of them in again. Even after a treatment is discovered, even after a vaccine is found, even after the day comes when he can finally hold them again.

Jacqueline Gualtieri’s short stories have previously been published by A Murder of Storytellers and her work as a journalist has been published in Food and Wine and Huffington Post. She’s a graduate of Emerson College with a degree in journalism and digital media. She’s a New Jersey native, currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area.