Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral Read Online Free PDF Page A

daughter. Work. The man in her life. The possibility of the seemingly impossible makes her beyond nauseous. Was Annie insane when she wrote out this request?
    The first plane leaves in nine days.
    “Shit,” Katherine says, rising to search for a phone. “Nine days? I’m going to kick your ass, Annie.”
    And then she stops because Annie G. Freeman is dead and Katherine P. Givins realizes that the traveling funeral Annie has requested will be no picnic. Who knows what will happen when a group of grief-stricken women who have never even been in a car together embark on a traveling funeral and bare their hearts and who knows what else to one another?
    “How in the hell,” she whispers to herself, “can I make this happen?”
    Katherine keeps moving and then her hand moves instinctively to touch the side of her bra—the lovely Bali—and she’s so accustomed to its support that she gasps as she remembers that the bra too has died.
    “Damn it,” she says probably for the fiftieth-plus time in the last ten hours. “The bra is gone.”
    Gone and now lying like a trophy on top of the dresser near the window in her bedroom.
    And there is barely time now for more than that quick thought of the bra before her mind explodes with the dozens of details that must be handled before tomorrow, as fast as possible, in a hurry, this exact moment. Schedules. Meetings. Plans. What should she erase? How should she erase it?
    She starts at the beginning, with the first name on the list, the list of other women who are about to have their own lives and schedules collapsed as if they were made of air. When Katherine makes the first call she does it braless.
    And the traveling funeral begins.

3

    Annie and Katie
    Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1963
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    The long halls at West High School are barely light at noon, so when Katie Givins finally figures out how to sneak into the school through the gym door at 7:16 P.M . there is just enough light to see her way past the locker room and toward the far side of school.
    Katie is not scared to be in her own high school walking alone from one dark room to the next without a flashlight or a friend. She is not afraid of what her mother will say when she gets home from the store and finds her note—
“Gone to find Annie”
—lying next to the telephone. She’s not afraid of being suspended or getting locked in all night. Katie is only afraid of one thing. She is afraid that she might not find her best friend in the girls’ bathroom near the science lab where Cheryl Swanson said she saw her just after the late bell. Her best friend since first grade. Her best friend who is in a mess of trouble.
    “She was just sitting there on the window by the register, you know the one we throw our cigarettes into, and I tried to talk with her but she was just sitting there—like she was there but she wasn’t. Do you know what I mean?”
    Katie knew.
    For the past six months Katie had watched her best friend dip in and out of a depression so deep it was as if Annie had surrounded herself with a brick wall. Annie talked about things, horrible things, and Katie had worked hard to know where she was twenty-four hours a day, to alert her parents—well, at least her mother, because no one knew where Annie’s father was half the time—and she talked to a counselor herself so she could try to understand what was happening. All big stuff for a fourteen-year-old who barely knew how to keep pace with her own inner emotional turmoil, let alone try to save her best friend from falling off the face of the earth.
    She didn’t see Annie in the bathroom at first. Annie was lying against the far wall, back behind the garbage can, with her feet up against the wall. She was barely conscious.
    “Shit,” Katie said as she ran to pull her upright. “Annie? What did you do?”
    Annie would say later that she remembered only that she reached up to put her hand on Katie’s face and that she wanted her to say something nice, just one