“A poem would be nice,” Stan said carefully. “Although that one sounds a little-well, we don’t have to work out all the details right now.”

“Still, we’d like to make as much headway as possible on the arrangements,” Susannah said. “And Mrs. Hartigan may have some thoughts.”

“Will she be calling me?”

“Perhaps,” Susannah said in the tight, careful voice she used whenever the subject of Chloe Hartigan came up in any context. “Dale went out to see her this morning, but she didn’t feel up to coming today.”

That was one way to explain it, Dale thought. Upon hearing that he wanted an Episcopalian priest to officiate, Chloe had pitched a fit and then pitched a book at Dale’s head. A thin book, to be sure, The Prayer of Jabez, but it had smarted a little. She had thrown a book at his head and called him a hypocrite and a stupid cunt, and he was still puzzling over both charges. The latter was a word Chloe had never used, even in her most Tourette-like rages. Had she been so upset that she had garbled her insult, saying “You stupid cunt” as opposed to “You and your stupid cunt”? He wondered if other families would tell Stan Jasper all of this, pour their hearts out. Or perhaps death, the ultimate bodily function, made people overly decorous and circumspect. Right now, for example, he knew he felt some odd need for the undertaker’s approval.

Yet here was a guy who was going to touch Dale’s dead daughter, who was going to oversee her final choice of dress, arrange her hair, supervise her makeup, pump her full of formaldehyde, or whatever it was these guys did. He’s going to see my daughter naked, Dale thought, and no man ever had. At least he was pretty sure that Kat was still a virgin, despite dating that college boy, Peter Lasko, a few summers back. Dale had disliked that guy from the moment he met him. There had been something predatory about him, swooping in to pluck Kat, then newly hatched from her baby fat. A nineteen-year-old college boy going after a girl who had just finished her first year of high school. He was slick, an opportunist. He had wanted to be an actor, for God’s sake, although Dale was pretty sure his greatest role was the nice-boy act he put on for Chloe, who ate it up sideways with a spoon. She had no judgment about people.

Then again, she always swore she liked Susannah.

“She’s so accomplished,” was what Chloe said. “She’s a great role model for Kat.” Dale kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, the insult that he was sure Chloe was holding back for the perfect moment. But she remained sweet as pie to Susannah. It was her way of underscoring the fact that Dale was her only enemy. Dale was the person she blamed for everything that had gone wrong in her life, even things that happened long before he showed up. Why? Their marriage counselor had spoken of the concept of shame, of the way that certain experiences left holes in people. Chloe had never gotten over her haphazard family, or the fact that her dreams were squashed so young. (Yet Dale’s father was as big a piece of work as anyone, and Chloe always mocked him for bringing that up.) Her ob/gyn had cited postpartum depression, but did postpartum last for fourteen years?

After the tumultuous years with Chloe, it had been hard at first to trust Susannah’s sweet, steady competence. “She has the best disposition,” Dale told his father when they started dating. “I hate to tell you this,” his father said, clearly not hating it, “but you said the same thing about the other one once upon a time.” Now, four years in, Dale had been proven right about Susannah. Always calm, always capable, never letting her emotions get the better of her. These were the things he loved about her.

Until right now, when he kind of hated her for these very qualities. How could she be so collected, so efficient? Maybe Susannah had never really cared for Kat. Maybe she was secretly glad Kat was dead. Now she would want a baby, and Dale had been very clear on that score-no more children. He was done.

“We expect a lot of people,” she was telling Stan Jasper in her lovely low voice, a voice that Dale had never heard raised except in joy or excitement. “Kat was a very popular girl, and…the nature of what happened makes this something of a public event. Yet we still want the service to be intimate, to reflect her.”

“I’d recommend a private service,” Jasper said, “followed by a more, ah, inclusive burial service. Or even a memorial service at the school, which would allow her little friends to grieve, without putting too much of a burden on you.”

Oh, he was such a shit. Susannah had loved Kat, too. There had been tensions, of course. It wasn’t easy for Kat to have a de facto stepmother who was only fourteen years older, even if Susannah was far more mature than Chloe would ever be. But Susannah’s cool competence, so comforting in other aspects of their life together, was also present in her relationship with Kat, and that had worried Dale a little. She admired Kat, complimented her, had even been instrumental in helping Kat get into Stanford, but she was unusually insistent, in Dale’s opinion, about not wanting to replace Chloe in Kat’s heart. One could argue that Susannah was being sensitive and responsible in not pressing for too intimate a connection to Kat. Yet Susannah’s reserve had always bothered Dale.

Then he remembered Susannah yesterday afternoon, crying wholeheartedly upon hearing the news, holding him as tightly as anyone had ever held him-outside Chloe, who used to grab on to Dale so hard when she was angry or sad that it had frightened him a little. Susannah felt this as deeply as she could-but she could never feel what he did. The irony of Kat’s death, if such a thing could ever be termed ironic in any aspect, was that the only person on earth who understood what Dale was going through was a person who was determined to hate him. That was Chloe’s religion, the Gospel According to Hating Dale. What did it matter if an Episcopal priest or Chloe’s Buddhist-monk friend officiated at the service? The only person who could please Chloe was someone who got up and reminded the mourners that everything was Dale Hartigan’s fault, forever and ever, amen.

“You haven’t been in an Episcopal church since we got married,” Chloe complained. “And that was only for your parents.” So hypocrite, okay. But why a cunt? Wait-now he got it. She had been going for his soft spot, mocking his masculinity. A real man would be able to take care of his daughter, Chloe was saying. Never mind that she was the custodial parent, that if anyone could have seen this storm gathering on the horizon, it should have been Chloe, who was part of Kat’s life on a daily basis. She knew about this strange feud with Perri, as it turned out, but had written it off as a rite of passage. “All girls fight,” she had said. No, this, too, had to be Dale’s fault somehow.

She hadn’t thrown The Prayer of Jabez at him because of the Episcopalian minister. That was a lie, the only thing he could think of to explain the red mark on his forehead to Susannah. Chloe had tossed the book at him because Dale had agreed that Kat’s death was all his fault-but not for reasons that Chloe wanted to hear.

“If I hadn’t let you pack my bags and put me out that first time,” he had told her. “If I hadn’t made the mistake of telling the truth, in hopes of making a truly fresh start with you. If I hadn’t accepted your edict that our marriage was over, if I had parked myself on our front porch and refused to move until you heard me out-”

“You stupid cunt,” she had said. “You think everything is about you.”

And the book had landed before Dale could finish his thought, which was simply, If I hadn’t left, I would have been here to protect her.