When Gracie is humiliated after following her best friend's brother to college and finds he's moved on without her, she grows closer to his rival--the captain of his basketball team--the infamous Kalen Rush, and suddenly Gracie wonders just what len...
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Funerals were long, quiet, and just a little bit devastating.
The orchestral organ piano roaring into life in the background as church hymnals began the procession of people lining up to pay their respects to the person in the casket towards the end after a few teary speeches from my mother's closest friends, and one from her almost-new husband.
I had stayed near the back, hiding out from Franny's parents who were somewhere in the middle with my father who'd been given special permission to leave his treatment to attend.
Why he wanted to come was beyond me.
Maybe it was to spit on her corpse.
There were a few people back there with me lingering on the outskirts, not wanting to be drawn into flinty conversations about the how's and when's they knew her—Jennifer Gatlin.
"She sure was a beauty, that one."
"Pity what happened to her."
"Wonder where her daughter is."
"I heard she left them when she was only a baby after having an affair."
I tuned them out.
The church had a mildewy scent to it that clung to the carpeted pews and plush floor leading up to the pulpit that housed her cherry oak casket.
Knowing her, my mother would've chosen something hot-pink to match her everyday aesthetics, but at least the family she was about to marry into had taken matters into their own hands and chosen for her.
Knowing Jennifer, the thought of coming up with her own will was still about twenty years down the line.
She'd always insulted my father for his addiction to alcohol, but in the end, it was her own addiction that got her before his. At least he had tried getting help.
She just slammed the pills with her evening wine and had assumed she would be fine when she woke up the next morning.
Oh, how wrong she'd been.
Spotting Franny and Colby standing up with their parents, I turned and headed out into the lobby of the church, not wanting them to see me and realize that I'd taken the bus not even moments after they'd left to come back into town.
It was one thing to decide to come to her funeral, and another thing altogether for others to know that it was what I had decided.
My eyes flickered up from the floor as an expensive looking pair of men's shoes blocked my vision and my heart stuttered in my chest at the sight of him.
It was eerie, almost uncanny really, the resemblance.
His dark hair shone like onyx even in the buzzing fluorescents of the old church lobby.
