Over breakfast, Jillian refused to go to the funeral. “It will be boring,” she said.

Her brown hair was messily escaping from yesterday’s ponytail and dipped into her cereal. Colette allowed herself to be distracted long enough to minister to the errant hair with a bobby pin, grabbed from a basket of trinkets she kept near the telephone. Her daughter’s funny freckled little face, still puckered by baby fat, looked up at this gesture with an expression hovering between wistfulness and resentment.

Colette kept a hand holding Jillian’s head tilted back, so she could look into her light brown eyes. “You really don’t want to go?”

Jillian shook back and forth, no. Continue reading →