Kara couldn’t have been engaged—and to him—and not have said anything. And besides . . .
Margot took a quick mental survey of her conversations with Kara over the past year. Kara hadn’t talked much about this latest roommate. There was the physical description: Imagine a big red dinosaur transformed into a forty-seven-year-old loser—with a mullet. He’s your basic mullet-saurus. And then there were the passing references: Mullet’s got his panties in a wad . . . Not that it’s any of Mullet’s business . . . Mullet will get over it . . . I can handle Mullet . . .
No, “Mullet” did not sound like a pet name or a term of endearment. There was not love in Kara’s voice when she’d uttered the word. Contempt, frustration—that was what Margot had heard.
“Did you know him?” Brad whispered. Margot had felt his eyes on her when Mullet was speaking. She shook her head. She couldn’t bring herself to speak.
Row by row, people walked past the open casket and out the door. Jews didn’t do this sort of thing. Shove ’em in a pinewood box and send ’em on their way—that was the Jewish funeral. That was how Margot’s mother had gone. But not Kara. Now Margot was being given yet another opportunity to gaze on her dead friend. When it was her turn to pass the casket, Margot dropped her eyes from Kara’s face to the bouquet in her hands, and tucked beneath the flowers, Margot spotted it: a cheap-looking little diamond ring on Kara’s finger.
How can you say it was cheap-looking if you barely saw it? Margot asked herself as she walked to the door. But that was how it struck her; she didn’t feel like arguing with herself. Cheap, fake, impossible.
“How did that happen?” Brad asked once they were standing outside.
“I don’t know,” Margot said. How many times had Kara turned down Brad?
As they waited outside, groups of familiar faces passed. Some were whispering—about Kara, about the fiancé. “Oh look, there’s Brad,” someone whispered. A couple of people from college nodded past Margot to him. No one offered her any sign of recognition. Finally, the casket was carried outside by Kara’s stepfather, Mullet, and a few men Margot didn’t recognize. Then everyone headed to their cars.
“Do you need a ride?” Brad asked.
“No, thanks,” she told him.
The procession to the cemetery took twenty minutes, though it was only a few miles away. There were a lot of cars to be moved, a lot of people inching along. Margot was glad to be alone in her own rental car as she sat wedged between cars of strangers who also believed they knew Kara.
Kara had been the last of her single friends, the last one without children. Margot’s childhood friends from Long Island now had one, two, and three kids; their photos decorated her refrigerator doors. When she got together with them, they talked about the price of day care and finding good schools, and soccer practice and dance classes, and husbands who worked too hard or traveled too much or didn’t help around the house. When Margot and Kara got together, they talked about theater and auditions and Margot’s business and Kara’s latest adventures. They laughed about the old days, about their lives, about nothing. There was a time they talked about Brad a lot, then intermittently, then not at all. More recently, they’d talked about Mike.
Had Margot misunderstood anything Kara said about Mullet? He really hadn’t come up much in conversation.
At the cemetery, Margot pulled into the gravel parking lot and walked up the hill toward the awning. Brad had arrived already, and Margot took a spot beside him a few feet behind the awning. From where they stood, Margot could see the parking lot and could watch the line of skinny women wearing black stockings in the eighty-something-degree heat as they marched up the hill. The ground was soft from recent rain. Margot was glad she hadn’t worn heels, and a little bit glad some of the other women had.
Having seen the casket open, Margot felt odd seeing it closed now and knowing that Kara was inside and that no one would open the box or look at Kara’s face again. The part of Margot that always liked to double-check—car doors, grocery lists, unplugged irons, credit scores—had an impulse to look inside. She imagined herself slowly opening the lid a crack, the way she’d open the oven, careful not to upset a soufflé. She’d look close at Kara’s waxed face, whisper her name, poke her with a toothpick perhaps—to be sure she was dead. Margot tried to recreate the image of Kara she’d seen at the funeral home. It really was a crumby-looking ring.
The ceremony was mercifully brief, and as soon as it ended, Kara’s little sister, Gwen, pulled away from the family and lit a cigarette, just as Kara would have done. Mullet pushed out from under the awning and did the same, muttering “Oh, man” in what sounded like a stage whisper.
WHEN she arrived at Kara’s mother’s house, Margot wandered to the dining room, where the table was covered with moist finger sandwiches, competing bowls of potato salad, and a surprising number of cans of dry-roasted peanuts. Perhaps there’d been a sale. She tried to resist the instinct to criticize, to put on her caterer’s hat and judge the menu and presentation. The carafe of chardonnay on the sideboard made her smile. You could fill a carafe with piss, and my stepdad would call it fancy, Kara once said. My family really knows how to put the k in klassy. Margot poured herself a glass and braced herself for the sharp taste and strained conversation.
She gave her condolences to Kara’s mother, Lucy Ann, who seemed glad to see Margot but said very little, and to Kara’s stepfather, Randy, whose thickly Southern “So-good-of-you-to-come” poured out in one word. Margot said a few words to Kara’s half-brothers, who hovered in a corner, somberly passing a hand-held video game back and forth, and she reintroduced herself to Gwen, who was moving about the house in a mask of officiousness. Margot even sucked it up and said hello to a few of the girls from the drama department. One of them said, “Oh my God, I didn’t see you before”—which was a lie. Another said, “It’s wild how different everyone looks”—but “everyone” meant Margot and “different” meant fat.
If she hadn’t quit smoking last year, this would have been a good time for about thirty consecutive cigarettes, so Margot topped off her wine and went out to the carport where she and Kara used to smoke in their college days. It still smelled like ashtrays, which was a comfort, though now it had more bicycles and toys than before. The ice chest where she and Kara used to sit had been replaced by a box of sporting equipment. Margot was marveling at all the basketballs and soccer balls and baseball paraphernalia when the side door opened and Mullet walked out.
The revulsion felt like a bubble inflating inside her stomach.
“Am I interrupting?” he asked.
“No,” she said, reluctantly.
He lit his cigarette, cupping the flame in his thick hand. Margot thought about going inside.
“You want a smoke?” he asked.
“I quit,” she told him.
He nodded.
They exchanged silences.
“Pretty crazy shit,” he said after a minute. “I’m the fiancé, Steve Donegan.”
He said the words with an ownership that made Margot uncomfortable, and she wished he’d trip over a stray baseball, but she took his extended hand. “Margot Cominsky,” she said. “I’m a friend of Kara’s from college.”
“Cool,”
