Tim's mother is too young to die, but she dies anyway--in a video that goes viral. Tim scrambles to hold his life together, but the person who keeps him on his feet turns out to be his half-sister, a fiesty girl who has no idea they're related, but...
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There is nothing that makes me never want to die quite like pulling together this funeral.
I never want to put anyone through this. All I want is to suffer in silence, but there's all this stuff that has to be done.
Heather's living room is spread in nothing but memories. We both sit on the floor, sifting for gold amid the recollections.
"So, I need your help on this one. Which picture?" Heather swings her computer around, offering two choices for the front of program. One I recognize from her birthday. There aren't any balloons and no sign of the cake, but the background is clearly one of the luncheon rooms at the inn. There's my mother, sipping through a straw, her eyes are too bright, too warm and brown. Too alive.
The second picture is from a road trip she took to BC, just her and Heather. I stayed in Murphy at Billy's while Heather took this picture somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Mom looks off at something out of frame, smiling but trying to hold her hair back from whipping across her face in the wind.
I always liked that picture.
She promised one day we'd drive through the mountains to the coast.
"The second one," I say, looking away quickly. Heather doesn't need my help. If her husband didn't call Murphy home, Heather would be bringing her graphic design talents somewhere bigger and better. In a town like Murphy, half her work comes from funeral programs and wedding invitations.
When I was a kid, I'd lay sprawled out on the floor while Heather put together printouts for events. It worked for a long time. Mom couldn't take me to work, but she convinced Heather to guard me while she working from home. This living room was my daycare.
Instead of colouring books spread out across the carpet, I have pictures. Some of them are shoved into albums, but mostly they're in stacks, still tucked into the Wal-Mart envelopes Mom brought them home in. Maybe she thought one day she'd have the free time to get into scrapbooking.
Heather will also put together the slideshow, but we need to pick out the pictures first. Facebook and my mom's hard drive have already been scoured, but digital cameras weren't Mom's game. It's not surprising, considering that we used to spend entire afternoons listening to music from the '70s on the record player.
