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

"Leigh. Leigh. We need you. I need your help."

A Sasquatch sighting of his actual sincerity and desperation.

Unfair.

"Please?" I begged. "Please."

He gave me maybe half a second.

"No one's asking you to wrestle a bobcat in a phone booth; just sell a few graves and call it a day, jeez! Don't be so dramatic. You love it!" No one loves real-time revisionist history more than Wade.

I love it.

Done.

My job training three months ago was twenty minutes of Wade giving me the lowdown on his way to lunch one afternoon. The whole operation basically involves binders. Two three-ring binders: one holds the maps of each section's graves, decades of names written in corresponding representative rectangles, and the other features general section maps of the entire park: Harmony Haven, Memory Meadow, Vaunted Valley. Seven sections in all, each one titled like a Lifetime original movie. Standard burials can be single-spaced, double-spaced (side by side, popular with spouses and siblings), or single or double depth (just what it sounds like). Cremains go in small drawers or in containers in the ground.

The mausoleum is a hulking white building made of drawers of caskets, each with a bronze plaque and a bud vase. People come to visit these drawers and tape notes to them, photographs, haiku about loneliness and circling birds.

Headstone orders are easy, just checking boxes, filling in forms. There are plenty of brochures and catalogs featuring lots of styles of granite and marble and bronze and examples of engraving details for people to browse through. Flowers. Birds. Tractors.

Beneath the pile of catalogs, Howard the County Coroner's business card is taped eerily to the desk. "Just in case," Wade likes to say.

In case what? Cripes.

Howard and his secretary, Terry, are both middle-aged and very patient on the phone, the only kind of contact I've had with them. I also only phone-know Dave, the go to Baskerville Headstone guy in North Carolina (who keeps calling me Lay no matter how many times I tell him my name is pronounced Lee and if he doesn't knock it off I'm going to start calling him Deev), and Jason, the super matter-of-fact mortician over at Chapel of the Pines who is only twenty-eight years old and according to Wade wears a ton of hair gel and became a mortician on purpose just to piss off his orthodontist father. All these guys, like the grave-buying clientele so far, clearly couldn't care less about my probably illegal plot selling. Apparently this backwoods inland Northern California town ("Hangtown," a sentimental homage to all the gold rush vigilante hangings committed here) has retained its devil-may-care-but-we-sure-as-hell-don't attitude regarding things like adherence to child labor laws. Maybe I'll report myself.

I am allowed to clock out (read: write my hours on a Post it) and lock the office door at six p.m., which sucks now that it's autumn and the sun's gone so early. Because, three months to get used to it notwithstanding, who wants to go traipsing through a bunch of graves in the dark? A park, a park, just a park. I whisper this mantra as I wend my anxious way around and over the people beneath my feet in the damp green hills, down into Peaceful Glen and onto the narrow dirt road that goes beyond the mausoleum and past the tin toolshed. Past stacks of cement grave liners perched precariously atop one another in lopsided piles. Past a silver single-wide trailer reflecting the very last, low sunlight through black silhouettes of pine branches.

Until I reach a line of flat headstones. Headstones with mistakes etched into them: misspelled names, wrong birth or death date. Wade, never one to waste good granite (or miss an opportunity to be regarded as clever), has taken all these "mistake stones" and laid them in a snaking path through our yard, straight to the front door of our house. He has demonstrated rare restraint in turning them text-side down. They gleam, cool and sleekly polished, beside more grave liners, filled not with people but with soil and sprouting geraniums and marigolds, hearty annuals and perennials that don't mind blooming in boxes normally found down in a grave with a casket nestled inside, one more barrier between the body and the earth to which it is supposedly returning.

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.