When the previous resident of my apartment, who was still living in it when my girlfriend and I viewed it for the first time, told us that the funeral home downstairs hardly ever held services, the effect on me was less than palliative. Jenna nodded thoughtfully in the way real estate shoppers are prone, apparently already aware of the macabre activities below. But I was quite taken aback. I hadn’t bothered to read the cursive blue text that decorated the building’s white stone outer walls, vaguely assuming, perhaps, that we might live above a diner, or a Greek bakery. A quick glance out the living room window, however, to a sign suspended above the busy sidewalk below, confirmed that just beneath us stood the Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home. If we took the apartment, we would indeed be keeping company with the dead, even if they were few.

The tenant, a clammy, heavyset woman in her thirties, bustled through an obstacle course of whirring floor fans that seemed to do little to mitigate her harried, overheated condition. She pointed to light fixtures and patches of wall in need of minor repairs, and spoke highly of the time she and her husband had spent in the apartment. She emphasized that though they were breaking their lease, they were by no means fleeing. The couple had unexpectedly purchased a home elsewhere in Brooklyn and felt eager to occupy it. “I don’t think I’ve seen a single funeral the whole time we’ve been here,” she told us for the second or third time.

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