Excerpt from Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I nod.

"Oh, so that's fun. Family business!"

I feel myself visibly blanch.

"Well, not fun, I just mean . . . like, we have the nursery, my parents . . ." She waves at Overalls Mom, at the van out in the graves. "So I work with them instead of having to get a job at a . . . like, a taco shack or something."

Taco shack?

"I was gone most of the summer, Habitat for Humanity internship, so now I can build anything you want with a drill and some drywall, no joke. And I'm normally only on morning deliveries when I guess you've been in school, so it's . . . We've been ships passing in the night! But my mom told me she's seen you. My stupid brother's at space camp all week, so I'm filling in for him and . . . I'm just really happy to finally meet you. I'm Elanor." She extends a small, pale hand. I scribble row M, space 81 on her list and draw a little map. Put it in her open hand. She folds it into her apron pocket.

I should say my name. Introduce myself.

"Well. Thanks," she says. "Sorry I scared you."

I shrug.

She leans back in the doorway.

"Smells okay in here. Better. The Hoegreffs were nice but that pipe was out of control." I nod.

"Okay," she says. "Maybe I'll see you later? Are you here a lot? Like a schedule?"

I nod.

Cold air swirls around her in the open doorway.

She pulls the list from her pocket, memorizes the plot number. "Thanks again." She jogs back through the graves.

I watch her find the space I've mapped, watch her mother fill the flower can with late-season imported daffodils—expensive!—and then watch as they turn the van around and head back out through the Manderleys.

The side of the van reads: serving hangtown—and the shire—since 1958. What on earth is "the Shire"? And how is she here in the morning—doesn't she go to school? Not the high school anyway; there is only one in this town and I would not have missed so close an Emily doppelgänger, not noticed that Princess Leia hair.

I'm so tired.

She talks so much.

But smart.

Like Emily. Too much.

Out my spying windows, I watch the ducks float aimlessly. The plain brown female ambles from the murk and takes a stroll through the babies' headstones, the small section of lawn reserved just for infants and children, a little graveyard day care. The worst. People's kids. That duck is stupid.

Despite Wade's piecrust promise of "Jeez Louise, that'll never happen on your shift, it's all Pre-Need, old people dying in their sleep, don't worry about it!" it's already happened once.

A kid from school. A couple of years older. I didn't know him, but he was an idiot. I know this because he died driving drunk with a drunk bunch of other idiots, but still, how much did that suck for his parents to have to come here and buy his grave from some random kid younger than their dead son? Sixteen used to seem so old to me.

The duck strolls from the babies' graves and nearly gets hit by a truck coming fast, gravel pinging the Manderleys. It parks at the office door.

Oh, man.

I almost wish the Rivendell van would come back.

Two men climb from the truck, shuffle in, sit heavily before me, and one of them says, "I need to bury my boy." Then he huddles over his lap and begins to sob while I fantasize about other after-school jobs I would rather have.

That duck has cursed me.

This is At Need. At the Time of Need. It will be a single grave, single depth. The father chooses a bronze headstone that will be etched with the boy's name, birth and death dates, and kind of a dumb poem the boy wrote last year, which at the time may have held no more significance than the obligatory fulfillment of a lame homework assignment but is now imbued with a sincere reverence. The boy is ten years old. Was.

Excerpted from Six Feet Over It by Jennifer Longo. Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Longo. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.