Aunt Helen appeared at my side in a cloud of Chanel No. 5 and rage. She was small, sharp, and built like a woman who’d survived the seventies by setting problems on fire. Her red lipstick never moved, not even at funerals.
“The service is about to begin,” she said quietly. “Sit down. We will deal with this.”
“There’s no seat,” I said, because that was suddenly the detail my brain chose to cling to. “My seat is there.”
Helen’s mouth went thin. She took one look at Grant, one at Becca, and the temperature around us dropped ten degrees.
“Then they can sit in hell,” she said under her breath.
But she guided me to the row behind them because the organ had swelled and Father Martinez was stepping to the front and three hundred people were turning toward the casket. My knees felt unreliable. I sat. In front of me, I could see the back of my husband’s head and the familiar line of my own dress against another woman’s spine.
The service began.