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“A poem would be nice,” Stan said carefully. “Although that one sounds a little-well, we don’t have to work out all the details right now.”
“Still, we’d like to make as much headway as possible on the arrangements,” Susa
“Will she be calling me?”
“Perhaps,” Susa
That was one way to explain it, Dale thought. Upon hearing that he wanted an Episcopalian priest to officiate, Chloe had pitched a fit and then pitched a book at Dale’s head. A thin book, to be sure, The Prayer of Jabez, but it had smarted a little. She had thrown a book at his head and called him a hypocrite and a stupid cunt, and he was still puzzling over both charges. The latter was a word Chloe had never used, even in her most Tourette-like rages. Had she been so upset that she had garbled her insult, saying “You stupid cunt” as opposed to “You and your stupid cunt”? He wondered if other families would tell Stan Jasper all of this, pour their hearts out. Or perhaps death, the ultimate bodily function, made people overly decorous and circumspect. Right now, for example, he knew he felt some odd need for the undertaker’s approval.
Yet here was a guy who was going to touch Dale’s dead daughter, who was going to oversee her final choice of dress, arrange her hair, supervise her makeup, pump her full of formaldehyde, or whatever it was these guys did. He’s going to see my daughter naked, Dale thought, and no man ever had. At least he was pretty sure that Kat was still a virgin, despite dating that college boy, Peter Lasko, a few summers back. Dale had disliked that guy from the moment he met him. There had been something predatory about him, swooping in to pluck Kat, then newly hatched from her baby fat. A nineteen-year-old college boy going after a girl who had just finished her first year of high school. He was slick, an opportunist. He had wanted to be an actor, for God’s sake, although Dale was pretty sure his greatest role was the nice-boy act he put on for Chloe, who ate it up sideways with a spoon. She had no judgment about people.
Then again, she always swore she liked Susa
“She’s so accomplished,” was what Chloe said. “She’s a great role model for Kat.” Dale kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, the insult that he was sure Chloe was holding back for the perfect moment. But she remained sweet as pie to Susa
After the tumultuous years with Chloe, it had been hard at first to trust Susa
Until right now, when he kind of hated her for these very qualities. How could she be so collected, so efficient? Maybe Susa
“We expect a lot of people,” she was telling Stan Jasper in her lovely low voice, a voice that Dale had never heard raised except in joy or excitement. “Kat was a very popular girl, and…the nature of what happened makes this something of a public event. Yet we still want the service to be intimate, to reflect her.”
“I’d recommend a private service,” Jasper said, “followed by a more, ah, inclusive burial service. Or even a memorial service at the school, which would allow her little friends to grieve, without putting too much of a burden on you.”
Oh, he was such a shit. Susa
Then he remembered Susa
“You haven’t been in an Episcopal church since we got married,” Chloe complained. “And that was only for your parents.” So hypocrite, okay. But why a cunt? Wait-now he got it. She had been going for his soft spot, mocking his masculinity. A real man would be able to take care of his daughter, Chloe was saying. Never mind that she was the custodial parent, that if anyone could have seen this storm gathering on the horizon, it should have been Chloe, who was part of Kat’s life on a daily basis. She knew about this strange feud with Perri, as it turned out, but had written it off as a rite of passage. “All girls fight,” she had said. No, this, too, had to be Dale’s fault somehow.
She hadn’t thrown The Prayer of Jabez at him because of the Episcopalian minister. That was a lie, the only thing he could think of to explain the red mark on his forehead to Susa
“If I hadn’t let you pack my bags and put me out that first time,” he had told her. “If I hadn’t made the mistake of telling the truth, in hopes of making a truly fresh start with you. If I hadn’t accepted your edict that our marriage was over, if I had parked myself on our front porch and refused to move until you heard me out-”
“You stupid cunt,” she had said. “You think everything is about you.”
And the book had landed before Dale could finish his thought, which was simply, If I hadn’t left, I would have been here to protect her.