ONE
Rikki
If it had been anyone else but my cousin Lisa dying like that, and anyone else but Aunt Carey doing the asking, I wouldn’t have gone to the funeral.
I’d escaped from the life we’d shared, shrugged off my childhood, as best I could, put myself through college and landed a job at the paper. I didn’t want to be reminded of those long days and longer nights in Pleasant View, California, when I was just another kid without a father, taken in by relatives whose sense of duty outweighed their own good judgment.
“I knew you’d come, Rikki Jean,” Carey had said when I met her at her hotel. “You’re still a pretty little thing.” Then her lower lip trembled, and she let the tears take her.
If there’s anything I hate more than my name, it’s my whole name, but the only rules Aunt Carey plays by are her own.
Now I hold her hand in the back seat of the limousine, and look out on Belmont Avenue, once a main drag, today an urban danger zone. The limo inches past the freeway, beyond the outskirts of this conflicted, basically angry Valley town. We head for that leftover geography cut off from the city, like dough from a cookie cutter, the part of town now occupied by only the very poor, the very transient and the very dead.
Lisa Tilton is no longer my cousin, butthe deceased.No, make thatthe victim,brought down by a heart attack just months before her wedding. And Carey Tilton, my aunt, has faded andshriveled since I last saw her right after she moved to Colorado, following her surgery. She’s the one who’s supposed to be dead, but not even cancer could stand up to her.
“She left you her crystal,” Aunt Carey says.
“That’s nice.” I’ve always felt Lisa’s crystal was too fragile. We couldn’t even clink it when we shared a glass of wine.
As our limo follows the car that is following the car ahead, I shift in the back seat and squeeze my aunt’s limp hand. Her peach-fuzz hair is a shaggier version of mine, but longer, with spiky bangs and fringe around her ears. People always said I looked as if I could be her daughter, which both pleased and embarrassed me back then. And Lisa? Other than a brief, roly-poly moment as an infant, Lisa always looked like herself. Perfect.
This is not one of those block-long, bar-included limos Aunt Carey reserved for Lisa and Pete’s wedding, but a short, stout vehicle that tries to scuttle, unnoticed, through the streets on its way to the part of town most residents visit only when they have no choice.
“Valentine’s Day. We’re burying her on Valentine’s Day.”
Aunt Carey sits like a statue next to me. All that I can see of Pete’s black suit in the back seat of the car ahead of us is caved in, his shoulders rolled toward the window.
During the funeral in the church where he and Lisa would have been married, Pete sat between Aunt Carey and me, gripping his knees so ferociously that I finally reached over and clutched his hand. Grief and emotions I could only imagine wiped his handsome features into a gray slate.
Fresh air. That’s what we all need. But none of us dares to say it. We walk through a ritual, written lifetimes before, procedure approved, as is this final ride we’re taking.
Finally, we pull into the memorial gardens where Lisa will be laid to rest, as the euphemism goes.
I touch Aunt Carey’s stiff shoulder.
“I’ve got to stay in the car during the next part,” I say. “I can’t watch it.”
“No, honey. You can’t stay here. She wouldn’t do that to you.”
No, she wouldn’t. Lisa would do what was expected, and do it better than anyone else. Aunt Carey would see to it.
“I’ll go with you, then.”
“I knew you would.”
Once free from the car, I take her arm, and we walk to the fake grass and the very real dark rectangle of earth I’ve been trying to avoid.
The minister approaches us, but Aunt Carey waves him away. She grips my wrist, as if she has just awakened from a dream. “I’ve got something important to tell you,” she says. “Something very important.” It’s the voice she used back then, when she asked me if I’d done my homework. She moves her lips close to my ear. “They killed Lisa, those people at Killer Body.”
“Of course they didn’t.” I step back from the harsh words, so rancorous I can almost smell them, like alcohol on her breath. “I don’t even know why Lisa insisted on joining Killer Body. She didn’t need to lose weight.”
“She wanted to, for the wedding, and those bastards gave her supplements, bad food.” Her blurred blue eyes bore into mine, begging me to believe her fantasy, assuage her grief.
“That’s not what did this to her. Heart disease runs in the family. It killed Mom, remember?”
“I remember, all right.” Her face goes pink, as if someone just pinched her cheeks. “Nan’s illness was her lifestyle,” she says. “Lisa didn’t smokeordrink.”
“No, she didn’t.” My mother did, and we both know it.
