The Inheritance Read Online Free Page A

foundation too light for her skin, eyeliner thick around her eyes, blush, bronzer, and lipstick that remains despite her teeth against her lips. If she cries her face might melt off and we wouldn’t want that.
    Across the small aisle, from the first pew, Ashleigh shoots to her feet. The low string of conversation halts. Ashleigh, dressed in a short yellow sundress – Yellow! Like she’s at a garden party! – has been wailing since the ceremony started. Her cry is the sound of someone who’s practiced in the mirror, fixing her lips and cheeks and eyes so she still looks pretty. She throws her hands over her face and runs out the room. Overly dramatic.
    Again, Gina bumps her shoulder into mine. “How’s it gonna look?” she whispers. “His only daughter – his only child – doesn’t have one nice thing to say about him?”
    I try to think of one good memory but all I remember is the icy aura my father wrapped around himself, whenever I was around. He was never supposed to have children, especially a daughter, and yet there I was, taking up space in his condo every summer, sucking in the same air as him, digging through his fridge in the middle of the night, asking for money to buy tampons. He openly resented me and now Gina wants me to stand and bullshit niceties for the sake of a dead man.
    “I don’t care how it looks.” I cross my arms over my chest and sink into the pew.
    Gina tuts beneath her tongue. “You’re gonna regret this, you know.”
    I highly doubt it.
    ______
     
    The press waits for us across the street from the funeral home. A small gaggle of them huddle around one another, sweating beneath the high afternoon sun, their cameras at the ready, hurling questions from the sidewalk. They have the right to come closer, to lean against the line of pitch black limos if they want, but they’re all too afraid.
    The press has never been able to prove that my father dealt with unsavory characters – drug dealers, hit men, what’s left of Chicago’s dwindling mob – but the rumors are enough to keep them at a distance when there’s a flock of large men in black suits and tattoos on their knuckles, pacing up and down the sidewalk, glaring at them from behind their sunglasses.
    Gina’s ushering me in the back of a limo when I spot Anthony Serafin of The Chicago Times. Mr. Eight-oh-Six. Without his suit he blends in with the lanky reporters next to him, their heads bent towards one another, a poor attempt to devise a plan. What happened to your brazenness? I want to shout across the street, but Gina has both hands against my lower back, impatiently shoving me inside.
    Darlene, her husband, and her kid ride with us to the repass. Stiffly, Gina extends an offer to Ashleigh but she declines in favor of riding with her college-aged friends. Six of them pack into a beat-up Sudan with Wisconsin plates and beer bottles and fast food wrappers littering the floor. They ride behind us with The Smiths playing on low, Ashleigh squished in the backseat, sobbing on her friend’s shoulder. I watch from the back window and catch Darlene and Gina tossing glances over their shoulders too.
    They pretend not to care but they do. My father’s friends are the type of men to see a sobbing woman, at a funeral or not, and turn to one another with a grin and say, “Women, right? They’re emotional about everything.” Years of composure, of solid reputation, demolished in a second.
    The ride is silent, Gina staring at her hands and Darlene staring at her phone. Her husband speaks lowly to their son, the little boy antsy in his seat. I know how he feels. A bundle of nerves shoots through my body, sliding up and down my fingers until I sit on my hands. Darlene and Gina catch me and I feel all of fourteen and sixteen again. The two of them throwing me a look whenever I tripped or coughed or breathed in a way that unsettled them.
    Nervous is the wrong word for how I’m feeling. Anxious might be better. Anxious to get this over