It hurt her eyes, everything so garishly beautiful, the entire cemetery blushing with late-spring flowers, petals scattering everywhere, gathering at everyone’s feet.
Everyone came, all the parents. A half a dozen brought their daughters, the younger ones who trained under Hailey, taking them out of school, thrusting their hard little gymnast bodies into stiff dresses, shoulders straining eyelet.
Teddy and his wife, Tina, both pewter-haired, tanned, long-limbed, soared over everyone else, their eyes downcast. Grand and conspicuous, they moved like mourning royalty.
But then there was Hailey.
At first Katie didn’t even recognize her, her hair thick and uncombed, her athletic body seemingly wedged into someone else’s black dress. Her face looked raw, her freckles more conspicuous against her fading tan. Among the others—with their dark shades, the older women’s hats, all their funeral masks—she looked naked.
Through the service that followed, she didn’t cry at all, despite the large lace handkerchief that she held awkwardly, as if someone had forced it into her hand.
The small-boned woman next to her had to be Ryan’s mother, a likeness in the soft dreaminess of her features. Weeping openly, her fingers over her nose and mouth, her delicate body shook and swayed. Surprisingly, the more she cried, the more Hailey tensed beside her, even leaning away, averting her eyes.
Katie kept hoping someone would comfort the woman. If Eric were here, he would have. If he hadn’t been so sure the car would be ready, which it wasn’t (was it ever?). He was always there for important events, dispensing appropriate words, accepting shared-sympathy hugs, letting Becca Plonski wrap those bony arms of hers around his waist, snuggling up to him like Katie had seen her do after her daughter’s coccyx injury.
Can’t you get your car after? Katie texted, her thumbs pressing so hard the letters kept repeating. Everyone’s expecting you. You never miss things.
I’ll try. I’m sorry. I’ll try to get there. I’m sorry.
Lost in thoughts during the sermon, Katie kept pondering that mug shot, the things Teddy had said, If you get down to the nub of it, people don’t change. But Ryan surely had.
And hadn’t Hailey? And, of course, Eric had. And Katie herself, no longer that wayward girl who couldn’t sit still, who once painted her phone number on her midriff at the beach. The midnight-blue nail polish took days to crack off, fade.
By the time Pastor Matthews finished speaking, Ryan’s mother was sobbing so throatily it almost sounded like singing. Katie moved forward, touching her shoulder lightly.
But then Teddy was there, reaching out to let her take his arm as they strode up the knoll.
Turning, Katie caught sight of Hailey, wind-whipped, hair caught in her mouth and her eyes narrow. It looked like she wanted something, nearly lunging toward Katie, her heel catching on a random footstone.
“Hailey, I’m so sor—” Katie started, but in the crowds, she lost her, couldn’t get to her in time.
The Belfour house—butter yellow, rambling, sun-filled, with a massive new cedar deck that stretched through half the yard—was packed as tightly as it was for a booster event, a preseason kickoff.
As Katie moved through the rooms, everything reminded her of everything: the first welcoming party, held just for Devon, with Teddy singing a karaoke “Welcome to the Jungle”; all the season kickoffs and strategy sessions, Tina’s snipping terriers underfoot. That vast trestle dining-room table, where Teddy had, six years before, unfurled the flow chart, Devon’s pathway to the gold.
Now, Katie watched as the table vanished under large platters of food arriving aloft in the arms of boosters, the same macaroni salad, meatballs, and cucumber salad, Molly’s dream bars, Gwen’s no-carb lasagna brought to every other event at the house. Katie’s fruit basket, which had seemed right at the time, sat untouched in the corner, its jaunty bow and pink cellophane spattered with food.
“I knew he had a record when I hired him,” Gwen was saying to Molly as Katie sidestepped her sight line. “But I believe in second chances. It’s the American way.”
With picture windows and sliding glass doors or mirrored walls in every room, there was nowhere to hide in the Belfour house. Before anyone could see her, Katie ducked into the hallway, where she found Ryan’s mother, wandering with a soggy, tilting paper plate.
“Mrs. Beck, I’m Katie Knox. Can I do anything for you?”
“No,” she said doubtfully, brushing her hair from her face with her free hand. “I packed in a hurry. My dress isn’t right.”
“It’s great,” Katie said, even though the dress was very short, and something you bought quickly at the mall, its threads puckering the first time you wore it.
Her own dress was at least a decade old, the one she always wore to meet with clients. The one Drew used to call her grown-up outfit, and now she glimpsed deodorant marks on the sleeves from the last time she’d worn it.