But Rick Crawford seemed right at home. He was the undertaker, well groomed and stout, and spoke with a drawl. The Crawfords had owned the place for generations, and the guy looked like he hadn’t been born, but had just crawled out of a vat of formaldehyde. I wondered if he grew into the death or the death grew into him. Anyway, it couldn’t have been an easy job. Especially not here, since I was sure he would have recognized at least half the people he had to drag on to the slab every morning. Sort of like Dad. Dad was the only therapist in Pleasant Hills, and I bet that, collectively, he and Rick Crawford knew most of the place’s dirty secrets, living and dead.

Our family was small – Dad’s parents had died young and Mom wasn’t close to hers – so the people who started to trickle in were only faintly familiar. Old family friends. (‘Your hair’s so long now, wow, strawberry blond, you have your mom’s freckles, wow, junior year already? Wow, wow, wow.’) Teachers I’d had who felt some sense of obligation to me. Bible-thumpers. Tongue-chewers. The women Mom knew from the gym, from her Tupperware parties, who said things like ‘It was his time’ over and over again. And there were a lot of strangers – patients. Thanked us for everything Dad had done for them. I knew none of them, which meant Dad had succeeded; he’d always made a point of keeping me away from that part of his life, from the cars pulling up before school and after school and on Sundays, from the murmurs and more-than-murmurs from behind the office door, from the weights fastened one by one to the heavy, rolling skin underneath his eyes.

But now they were all here, staring me in the face, and any one of them could have done it.

Olivia and I were best friends mostly because we were supposed to be. We had barely anything in common besides the fact that fate had dictated we were to live on the same cul-de-sac, her at three o’clock and me at twelve, but she let me talk about movies and I let her talk about everyone and everything else. She was the high school’s chief theatre tech, a social butterfly, had other friends. Me, not so much. Either way, we’d made an unspoken agreement to see out the rest of our formal education careers together; I don’t think either of us had anticipated that the agreement would include funeral attendance, but she was here, and although I wouldn’t tell her, I was grateful.