She didn’t frequent a ton of funerals, but this one was particularly strange. For one, everyone looked so damn good. Everyone here, at least, the high society of the DMV, treated the event like Easter Sunday—decked out in their best black, exchanging cards, and speculating on the price of someone’s new Potomac property. She even saw The Beverly Bennett. Her mother’s gossipy over-the-top girlfriend who screamed her daughters’ net worth to the rooftops. In her fifties, she was still a knockout, dressed in a tight black number that made men half her age whistle. She acted like it was such a miracle that not one but two of her drop-dead gorgeous daughters (she had at least seven of them) had catapulted themselves into the stratosphere.

Guess how?

The sheer power of being drop-dead gorgeous. It’s not news, Bev! She wasn’t bitter. She wished Liza and Janae well, but she just wanted to stop hearing about them. Nora would never stop traffic like the Bennetts, but she had been popular in the past. She had good skin and strong straight teeth. Some would even call her lovely in a soft light, but she wouldn’t ever have a serious relationship. The video had assured that.

Beverly Bennett patted her mother’s back, and a ring the size of Mt. Vesuvius glinted on her finger. It added to Nora’s mounting off-kilter feeling to think the relatively well-off Dashes used to buy hand-sewn dresses from those “poor Bennetts” out of pity.

The funeral itself was off. Somebody’s nephew was playing an up-tempo high school marching band rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Nora decided right then that there would be no upbeat numbers at her funeral. I want that shit sad. Not jazzy and vaguely sexy like this one. Even stranger, she and her mother, the chief mourners, if you will, were being completely ignored. No bereaved aunties and uncles tapped her shoulders. No one gave them their thoughts and prayers or handed them lukewarm potato salad. She knew her mother was not on good terms with her father’s family, but this was downright cruel.

Nora felt a light tap on her shoulder and jumped a bit too high. She was terrified of that tap. That someone in a crowded room was going to squint their eyes and walk toward her. Maybe a man sucking his teeth would say, “You look so familiar. Have I seen you somewhere before?” And of course the question was rhetorical.

Of course they had seen me. All of me.