“Gotcha. Don’t talk to me again today, I don’t want to be seen together.” With those words, he slipped past me.
Didn’t want to be seen with me? Was I so awful? Did I smell? I tilted my head toward my right shoulder, hoping to catch a whiff of myself. All I could smell was my perfume. I’d worn my best black dress.
I pushed my way through the crowd and took my seat again. Apparently, people had noticed that Alex Holt—or I—had been sitting there and had left the three spots open. Where were Alex and Jack? How long did it take to ask questions? My heart started to pound.
When I saw Diego sit next to Doyle, I did a mental fist pump. At least that was going swimmingly. More people took their seats as strains of the Eagles’ “Desperado” began to play at top volume.
It was a soft rock tribute to Gene’s rebellious spirit. It was also tacky as hell.
I spotted Jack and Alex inching down the row toward me. Alex took his previous seat and Jack sat on my other side just as Don Henley was hitting the song’s crescendo.
“How was it?” I angled my body and faced Jack.
“Went well. I’ll tell you about it later. He’s familiar with my work so we had a lot to discuss. He’s a good guy. We might go fishing sometime.”
I turned to face the front of the room, letting that information soak in.
Don Henley stopped crooning. A man I didn’t recognize took the podium, and it turned out he was a lay minister from the funeral home. He read some generic Bible passages, quoted singer Willie Nelson, and motioned to the front row.
“Barbie Robinson, the deceased’s widow, would like to say a few words.”
She tottered up on heels. “Momma loves you,” she said, patting the beer-themed casket.
I fought hard not to wince visibly.
Each moment was stranger than the last. She told the story about how she and Gene met—she’d been a bikini model at a boar hunting tournament—and she started to sob. I blinked several times, trying to square this sobbing woman with the cool and calculating one I’d talked with as she’d floated in the pool the other day.
As a funeral home employee escorted Barbie back to her seat, another man rose. I vaguely recognized him as the owner of a diner near the interstate. He launched into a story about how he and Gene used to drink beer together after high school and later shoot cans in the woods.
“One time we started a forest fire,” the man said, chuckling. The crowd did, too.
I glanced to Jack, who wore a slightly baffled expression. I then snuck a gaze at Alex, whose face was like stone.
Speaker after speaker told stories about Gene. Most involved hunting, fishing, and bars. Some were bawdy, and the audience laughed at those parts. Honestly, that was possibly the strangest part about the service. Not the beer-can-shaped casket, or his widow’s (possibly) fake tears.
It was that Gene seemed to have a lot of friends who would miss him.
This made me sad, and I became lost in my thoughts. Gene had been pretty terrible to my sister and me, and to other women, if the bartender was any indication. But to his guy friends, he’d been a great person. Well, if not a great one, an entertaining and adventurous one at least. Someone who always had beer, and who adored Johnny Cash during karaoke night.
Wait, was I sprouting sympathy for that pig? Gah.
A half hour later, people were still telling Gene stories. Jack jiggled his leg. Alex clicked his pen every thirty seconds. I knew this because I timed it with my watch. My eyes grew heavy and scratchy. I wished I’d drunk more coffee.
Then a man in a sharp-looking suit jacket took the lectern. By the looks of him, he wasn’t part ofGene’s good-old-boy inner circle, and his California drawl confirmed that.
“I only met Gene a short while ago. Six weeks. I’m an assistant director with a reality TV production company in Los Angeles, and I came out here to do some preproduction with him.” He took a deep breath and gripped the sides of the lectern. “I was hoping to give you some good news today about Gene’s show. After his death, we realized we’d filmed enough for a one-hour episode, and we were planning to release it as a special web series, as a tribute to Gene. Unfortunately, all of the footage has been stolen.”
Gasps and murmurs filled the room. I snapped to attention, now fully awake. Why would someone steal the reality TV show footage of Gene? I turned my head to look at Alex, but he clicked his pen with his thumb and reached for the notebook in his chest pocket. He jotted a few notes but didn’t meet my gaze.
When I looked at Jack, it was a different story. He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes, and I mirrored him. He knew something was up.
The reality TV guy, who never gave his name, walked away from the lectern after saying a few kind and generic words about Gene’s enthusiasm for hunting gators. I wanted to chat with him afterward, and my eyes followed him to his seat, which wasn’t that far from where Diego was sitting near Doyle.
So much to keep track of.
I felt my phone vibrating with a message in my purse. As a man in a camouflage T-shirt told a painstakingly detailed story about how he and Gene once hunted a python in the Everglades while drinking an entire twenty-four-can case of beer, I leaned forward and opened my bag to check my text.
It was from my sister.
