Out in West Des Moines, her happy thoughts about iconic Iowans faded. A panhandler stood by the intersection, wearing a raggedy Santa suit. The red had bled into the white and his buckle dangled loose off the belt. The Yosemite Sam beard was the man’s own, chest-length and snow-dusted—he could have been a rogue member of the Manson Family. Bony fingers held up a cardboard sign: will work 4 bus ticket. Mary-Sue entertained the idea of paying him to attend the funeral in her place, and this made her laugh so hard she narrowly missed a flatbed full of hogs. The driver gave her the finger. She rolled down her window, called him a country-ass pigfucker, sped away, and felt good.

The funeral was very tasteful. Nameless former colleagues from Cedar Falls had driven through a small blizzard to be there. Nameless relatives from the Iowa countryside showed up in ill-fitting borrowed suits. One of the Cedar Falls sophisticates remarked on how classy it was for the funeral home to have hidden its hearses from the visitors’ lot.

What Mary-Sue had been told was correct—she didn’t have to do anything but show up. The entire program had been planned without her. The moment she arrived at the door, she was escorted by Mr. Evans, the funeral director, to the front-row pew and handed a box of Kleenex. The aunt or whatever who’d spoken to her on the phone smiled at her smugly from the far end of the chapel but never once came over; she planted herself by the row of wreaths, greeting well-wishers and fiddling with the hundred gold bangles she wore on her arm like Slinkies. Mary-Sue was grateful she’d smoked a joint in the parking lot or she’d be running at her with a clenched fist.

On the stage, atop a table with a burgundy silk runner, sat a jade-colored urn. She hadn’t even known that her father wished to be cremated. Everybody at the funeral, it seemed, knew her father better and loved him more than she did. She was a stranger.

When the service began, a fifty-ish pastor with a comb-over came to the lectern. He had the face of someone who’d fallen asleep at the sewing machine and woken up with his features stitched together funny. Then the aged organist with shaky Parkinson’s hands played a couple of songs from The Music Man, which Mary-Sue felt were wholly inappropriate. Some people cried during this time—perhaps they knew these songs had meant something to her father.