Don Collins stood in the sun and mapped out in his mind a rectangle on the grass, eight feet by three feet. He is forty-nine, wears a handful of pomade in his hair, and no longer needs a tape to take the measure of things. Indiana state law dictates that the lid of the burial vault be two feet below the surface. That meant Collins had to dig down five feet, ultimately lifting out about a hundred cubic feet of earth. He wouldn't need a tape to measure that, either. Since 1969, his father, Don Sr., has owned the Collins Funeral Home, just up Elm Street, just past the little yellow house with the two yellow ribbons tied to the tree out front. As a boy, Don Jr. had lived upstairs with the spirits and the rest of his family, over the chapel. He and his younger brother, Kevin, would later work with their dad in the back room, embalming the bodies of their neighbors at three o'clock in the morning, and he still assists his father in his capacity as coroner. But Don Jr. has had enough of bodies in back rooms. He likes it better outside, in the sticky air, working with the earth.
 Don Collins stood in the sun and mapped out in his mind a rectangle on the grass, eight feet by three feet. He is forty-nine, wears a handful of pomade in his hair, and no longer needs a tape to take the measure of things. Indiana state law dictates that the lid of the burial vault be two feet below the surface. That meant Collins had to dig down five feet, ultimately lifting out about a hundred cubic feet of earth. He wouldn't need a tape to measure that, either. Since 1969, his father, Don Sr., has owned the Collins Funeral Home, just up Elm Street, just past the little yellow house with the two yellow ribbons tied to the tree out front. As a boy, Don Jr. had lived upstairs with the spirits and the rest of his family, over the chapel. He and his younger brother, Kevin, would later work with their dad in the back room, embalming the bodies of their neighbors at three o'clock in the morning, and he still assists his father in his capacity as coroner. But Don Jr. has had enough of bodies in back rooms. He likes it better outside, in the sticky air, working with the earth. Your home sweet home is desperate for good savings isn't it?  It was 2010, and Miranda Lambert was nervous. It had been five years since her major label debut album, and though she had seen steady success, she had not yet had the breakthrough hit single that would establish her as a serious force in country music. Country radio (which, to this day, holds more power for its audience than in other genres) didn't seem quite sure what to do with this fiery young woman who, unlike many of her peers, wrote most of her own tracks. Early on, Lambert was defined by wild-eyed revenge songs like "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and "Gunpowder and Lead"—"I was pigeonholed," she says, "like, 'Oh, she'll just burn your house down or shoot you.'" Then the sassy, simmering "White Liar" started making a run, pushing its way into the Top Ten. "The town was watching," she says over a screen from her house in Nashville. "Like, 'Is she ever gonna have a hit or she just gonna be one of those other kinds of artists?' I was frustrated—at some point, I wanted to move up. I wanted to get the middle slot on tours instead of the opening slot, and ultimately headline, and in country music, radio is that vehicle." Everything you need for weddings, job interviews—or simply stunting on your underdressed friends. Don't miss out on these epic savings. I don't think my late parents cheated on one another, but I can't ask them anymore, can't say, But come tell me now this time for real, now that I'm old enough. As far as I know, they didn't cheat. As far as I know, my mother never cried in a car on the way to her favorite restaurant, like a friend of a friend's mother, who I call the Lorax. The Lorax's husband told her to get dressed up and pick out the place she wanted to go to, when he had not done so in months, and she spent her fifty-six-year-old day preparing her face, creaming her body, hooking a bra, and doing that thing that women do, touching a part of ourselves we imagine being touched later by a man. |
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