This time it was Mindee’s turn to be critical.
“You’re wearing that to the memorial?” she asked, indicating the cheerleading uniform with a jab of her fingertip.
Starla faced the mirror again and carefully reglossed her lips. “The squad is going to be there. All in uniform.”
Mindee shook her head disapprovingly. “I don’t know about that, Starla.”
“We aren’t going to do a cheer, Mom.”
Mindee pulled her heels from the floorboards and walked closer, touching Starla on the shoulder.
“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I was thinking, you know, about how Katelyn felt about you being a cheerleader. It seems inappropriate.”
Starla pulled away. She wanted to say something about her mom’s boyfriend being inappropriate, but she held it inside. After all, the day wasn’t about her, her mom, or Jake. It was about Katelyn Berkley and her suicide or accident.
Or whatever. Starla didn’t care. Dead was dead, no matter how someone got there.
Teagan, a preteen with the pink flush of emerging acne and a modified Bieber haircut, wore black jeans and a sweater. He’d been unusually quiet for the past week, and Starla took his hand. It was clammy, but she didn’t mind. She liked having Teagan around to use as a human shield between her mother and her boyfriend.
“Let’s go. Let’s go say good-bye to Katie,” she said.
“I guess so,” he said, dropping her hand. “I don’t need you to drag me there.”
Starla and Teagan started down the stairs, their mother behind them. At the landing was Port Gamble’s answer to a jack-, or in his case, a Jake-of-all-trades, master of none. Jake Damon was the town’s handyman. Until he took up with Mindee Larsen, most women would have said he was reasonably handy—with or without his toolbox.
Or something like that.
Jake smelled of beer, which was how he usually smelled. He looked Starla up and down and raised a brow in that creepy way he had when he was drunk and thinking he was sexy.
“Go, Buccaneers,” he said, nodding like a dashboard bobblehead.
Starla wanted to ignore her mother’s squeeze, but she couldn’t hold her tongue. “Why don’t you go off somewhere and buccaneer yourself?”
Jake clinched his fists. The large veins on his arms stretched against his skin, and Starla thought he was a bigger jerk than she ever could have guessed.
“Did you say what I think you said?” he asked, stepping closer.
“You heard me,” she said, giving proof to all doubters that pretty could also be tough. “I said Bucc You!”
Mindee yanked on her daughter’s hand. “Starla! What a mouth you have.”
“Let go of me,” Starla said, twisting away. “I didn’t say anything that bad.”
Mindee looked at Jake, pleadingly. “She’s grieving; let it go.”
“She’s a pain in the ass,” he said in his Bud breath. “But sure, I’ll let it go.”
The four of them slipped on their coats and started out the door. The church was only a short distance away and they decided that, despite the cold weather, they’d walk. There wouldn’t be any conversation—just hurried steps through the cold led by a very pissed-off cheerleader.
WHILE KATELYN BERKLEY’S FRIENDS AND HER PARENTS waited patiently for the cause of death to be determined—and for grandparents Nancy and Paul to return from a four-day cruise to Ensenada they refused to cancel—her body had been kept on ice under Birdy Waterman’s watchful eye. Finally, two weeks after Katelyn’s death, it came time to bury her. Her casket was fuchsia and ivory, a color combination more appropriate to an ice-cream store than to the final resting place of a girl who eschewed such colors in favor of the drab tones that she wore in the months before her death. Behind the casket, on the church altar, were photographs of the dead girl’s life: Baby, Girl Scout Daisy, and Sullen Teen. All of Katelyn’s iterations of life stages were on display, along with a few things she’d made: a candy dish she’d glazed in purple and black at one of those coffee and pottery shops, a painting of a forlorn moon over the tar-colored waters of Port Gamble Bay, and a letter opener made in shop class that looked suspiciously like an old-fashioned barber’s razor blade.
No one said anything about that. How could they?
The church was full, though not particularly because of Katelyn’s popularity in the community. It was true that she was well known because of her omnipresence at the family’s restaurant, busing tables, helping the cooks, sitting at the counter reading a vampire novel with a half-naked boy on the well-turned cover. Indeed, the swelling size of the crowd at her memorial service had little to do with Katelyn specifically. People were there because of her youth. Nothing, all ministers know, brings out mourners like the death of a child. Katelyn might have been more than halfway to adulthood, but she was still a little girl.
A very dead little girl.
Hayley, Taylor, and their parents sat in the third row, two rows back from the Berkley family. Colton James sat behind the Ryans, and three rows farther back were Beth Lee and her mother, Kim. The order was as it had been the night of Katelyn’s death: the closer the relationship with the deceased, the nearer to the casket.
Occupying the seats across the aisle from the Berkleys were Starla and her family. Next to them mourned the rest of the Buccaneers cheer squad.
Taylor whispered to Hayley, “Look, it’s the pom-pom posse. If you ask me, Katelyn’s spinning in her grave now.”
“She’s not in her grave yet,” Hayley corrected.
“Ya know what I mean. She hated it when Starla ditched her for cheer.”
“She hated it even more that she didn’t get on the team.”
Valerie put her finger to her lips but thankfully didn’t follow the gesture with the librarian’s shushing noise.
Someone pushed a button and a CD recording of an abbreviated verse of Celine Dion’s bombastic classic, “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, tinkled aloud.
Hayley kept her mouth zipped, but she couldn’t help but think she’d rather be dead than have that song played at her memorial. And in which case, even if she were dead, she still didn’t want Celine, Mariah, or Whitney piped into her service.
VALERIE RYAN GRIPPED HER HUSBAND’S HAND as they looked up at what had to be the saddest sight in the world: the pink casket in the front of the Port Gamble church, a place in which historically the denomination changed with the tide and the whims of the mill boss’s wife. St. Paul’s was home to an Episcopal congregation then, but it had once been a Lutheran, Catholic, and even a Baptist church. It didn’t matter. The faithful went regularly, no matter what religion the wife had decreed for the town. Taylor and Hayley cried, not in the way that close friends shed a stream of tears, but tears born of a shared moment of tragedy. Some who lined the spaces in the old oak pews sobbed because they loved Katelyn. Others cried because of the overwhelming sadness that comes with a young life lost.
Valerie’s own tears came from memories of when her girls were small, memories from the darkest time of her adult life.
The event had been long ago, but the feelings of hopelessness and the fragility of life came to the mother easily while the minister talked about Katelyn’s abbreviated life. Valerie’s own girls had been side by side in Seattle’s Children’s Hospital for thirty-one days after the crash, their eyes fluttering, scanning, under eyelids both parents prayed would open. The hospital wouldn’t allow another bed in the room. Apparently, fire codes were more important than an aching heart of a mother or father. So Valerie brought a foam mattress from their home in Port Gamble, and she and Kevin took turns sleeping on it in the space between the girls’ beds.