Chapter 1
The church was packed to overflowing, the altar crowded with flower arrangements. Two priests and a monsignor to co-celebrate her funeral Mass, just as her mother had stipulated. Mary Helen Sullivan Dunagin would have beamed with pride, Maeve thought.
Everyone was kneeling in preparation for communion when they heard the doors opening at the rear of the church, and then the thud of heavy shoes, like boots, on the wooden floor.
Her cousin Jeanette turned to look, sucked in her breath, then muttered, “Christ on a bike with Mary on the handlebars! Would you look at what the cat dragged in?”
Maeve’s backbone stiffened but she kept her eyes on the altar as the footsteps grew closer.
Then, someone was poking her shoulder, hard.
Finally, she turned. Sure enough, there stood Therese, dressed in a short black skirt, beat-up black leather motorcycle jacket, black tights, and Doc Martens.
Her chestnut hair had been chopped short and stood up in spikes.
She’s put on weight, Maeve thought, with a hint of grim satisfaction.
“Shove over,” Therese demanded, louder this time, poking her again with a talon-like purple-painted index finger.
“Shhh!” Maeve hissed, but she glanced at her aunt Bernadette, sitting beside her, and Bernie and her daughters Patsy and Denise obligingly scooted sideways in the pew. Aunt Frannie was in the pew behind them, flanked by Uncle Keith, who sat on the aisle, and her cousins Dylan and Shane.
Instead of kneeling with the rest of the family, though, Therese plopped her butt down on the worn oak bench, arms crossed defiantly over her chest. And when the organ music swelled with “Faith of Our Fathers,” the communion hymn, instead of making the decent, universally accepted gesture of standing and stepping into the aisle, Therese sat there, unmoving, forcing everyone, including their half-crippled aunt, to awkwardly climb over her and those goddamn army boots of hers.
Maeve wanted to pinch Therese’s arm hard, the way her mother had their whole childhood when their behavior in Mass was less than acceptable.
She wanted to poke her older sister in the back, tell her to stand up straight, for the love of God, or at the very least fix her with their mom’s patented laser-like stink-eye.
But she did none of these things. Instead, she closed her own eyes and concentrated on going through the motions, the rituals, of consigning Mary Helen Dunagin’s earthly remains to a higher, better place.