Throwing her purse onto the bed from the doorway, she walked quickly to the closet and pulled out a black dress.
“I need help,” she begged as she carefully pulled the sling over her head with a wince, panic now taking over. “I can’t get the zip on my dress done up with a bum arm. God, I can’t even get dressed or undressed in under an hour because of it.”
It was a slight exaggeration, but only by a few minutes.
Walking calmly over to her, my lips didn’t start twitching until I got to her. Seeing what she’d done from a relative distance was one thing, but it was a whole other thing up close.
“Don’t say a word,” she warned as I carefully pulled her top over her head and then gently moved it down her bad arm.
“I wasn’t going to say a word.” That didn’t mean that I didn’t have at least seventy of them to hand, just in case.
“It’s for Maude.”Two hours later…
We’d driven to her parent’s house first, my family meeting us there before we set off for the church. It was only meant to be five cars that left the Crew’s house, but after I pulled up, car after car pulled up on the sidewalks around us.
When they’d gone to her apartment, they’d found a letter she’d written with what she wanted today to be like. In it she’d told them she didn’t want a funeral cortege, and that they were to do it, leave, and then have a party to celebrate. If they went against that, she would “haunt them and fuck up their hair every day for the rest of their lives”.
It wasn’t until we drove through town toward where the church was at the far end that we realized that almost every resident had come out to bid her farewell, all dressed in bright colors, standing with their right hands over their hearts and their heads bowed. There were banners with sentiments like ‘Gone but not forgotten’, ‘The higher the hair, the closer to heaven’, ‘Miss you, Maude!’ and finally a huge banner that read ‘We’re glad you had so many best moments of your life. Loved you here and we’ll love you in heaven’.
Seeing it, Katy drew in a shaky breath and reached for my hand, holding on as tightly as she could as she watched people in the distance bow their heads as the first car carrying her parents reached them.
“She would have fucking loved this,” she croaked. “Especially that sign about the hair.”
Speaking of…
As we parked up in front of the church and got out of the vehicle, I looked at all the women from our families. “Are y’all sure about this?”
“It’s what she would have wanted,” they all said at the same time.
They were absolutely right about that. Somewhere up in the sky right now, Maude Crew was probably grabbing onto someone’s hand and laughing her ass off at the bouffants that every woman walking into the church had done to their hair.I was playing Tears In Heaven again, this time as I stood beside her casket as it was lowered into the ground. All around me were huge bouffants swaying from side to side as every female who’d attended the funeral – including my Aunt Rita who’d extended her stay to say goodbye to a woman who’d made a huge impact in only a matter of hours – got caught up in the song and swept away by the words.
Beside them were the male attendees – all with their hair at a normal height – who were openly crying.
That’s when I knew, somewhere up in the sky right now, Maude Crew was definitely grabbing onto someone’s hand and laughing her ass off.TwentyKatySixteen months later…
In the grand scheme of things sixteen months was nothing, but yet so much could happen in that nothing period of time.
It had started with Shane being charged with a long list of things including (but not limited to because he was a bad bastard) murder, attempted murder, assault, breaking and entering, and kidnapping. It had taken a year for him to be tried and sentenced, but he was finally behind bars and unlikely to get out.
The judge had felt strongly about the fact he’d inflicted injuries on a terminally ill woman which had led to a slightly more premature death and had then kidnapped and threatened to kill a one-year-old while the woman in question lay dying only feet away. He’d also taken offense to the fact that he’d done his best to inflict life altering injuries on me seeing as how he’d told the jury that he’d felt something pop under his hand while he was choking me and had assumed he’d broken my neck so I’d be “too paralyzed to go after him”. What he was too stupid to know was that it was only my larynx moving under his hand.