Chapter 7: The Benefit

The parish hall had never held so many people.

There were two hundred folding chairs and round tables with white paper cloths.

A bake sale filled one corner, and a glitter banner over the stage read FOR VEDA.

I stood in the doorway at six o'clock in the red dress, with my pearls on and Glenn's hand on my back.

The room went quiet in rings.

"They're staring," Joan said at my shoulder.

She was wearing a leather vest and her good boots, and she had a paper plate piled with three kinds of casserole.

"They think I'm dying."

"You look incredible for a dying woman."

"Thank you, Joan."

"I mean it. It's very brave. People will cry."

I laughed, and the nearest table turned to look.

My mother came off the stage in a black dress with a handkerchief at her eye.

She took both my hands in front of the whole room.

"My brave girl," she said, loud enough for the back row. "You came."

"You asked me to."

"I did." Her thumbs pressed into my knuckles. "Now sit where you're told, and when I call you up, say what we discussed."

"We didn't discuss anything."

"You'll know it when you hear it."

She led me to the head table.

Daphne was already seated there in a black dress and no necklace.

She wore a face of fresh grief that had not been there at the shower.

Her fiancé sat beside her.

His mother and father sat across from them, stiff and polite, with a plate of ham in front of each.

Everyone ate.

The priest blessed the meal.

Then the slideshow started, and I watched my own life flicker across a bedsheet on the stage wall.

Me at six on a swing. Me at twelve with braces. Me at nineteen, behind the register at the hardware store.

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