Because the notes and the emails were only the personal cruelty, and personal cruelty, in the end, was Whitney’s business and mine.
What came next was everyone’s.
The next image was an invoice.
Not for flowers.
Not for catering.
The line item, in plain black text, read: Family Seating Upgrades.
Chapter 9 — Family Seating Upgrades
For a moment the invoice just hung there, ten feet tall, and I watched the room try to make sense of it.
Family Seating Upgrades. It was such a bland, bureaucratic phrase.
It took a beat for people to feel the weight underneath it.
Then, from a table near the front, an elderly voice said, uncertainly, “Wait.”
It was my Aunt Diane, my mother’s oldest sister, a woman in her seventies who had driven four hours to be here.
She was staring at the screen, and then at her own hands, and then at the screen again. ”
I paid three hundred dollars,” she said, to no one in particular, in the fragile, bewildered voice of someone realizing they’ve been robbed by someone they love. ”
For a — for a better seat.
Whitney said it was — she said everyone contributed.”
The room shifted.
It was almost physical, the way it moved.