She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [117]
At Cook Walden, Thompson led them into a showroom, where she pointed out the choices. Celeste walked through and chose a casket for Steve. Then she turned to the twins. “While we’re here, why don’t you pick out your coffins?” she said.
Jennifer looked at Kristina in alarm. “No, we don’t want to do that,” she said.
Startled as well, Kristina protested, and both the girls turned to walk away. As teenagers, they didn’t want to ponder their own deaths. What they didn’t know was that their mother had been contemplating their deaths since their births. While at Timberlawn, she told a therapist that from the twins’ first years she kept special outfits in their closets, ones she considered their burial clothes.
“Come on,” Celeste said. “Pick them out.”
They refused.
“Then I’ll do it for you,” she said. With that, Celeste walked through until she stopped in front of a white casket with a lilac interior that shone pink.
“Pink’s my color,” she said to Thompson. “I’ll take one of these for myself and two for the girls.”
Steve’s obituary ran in the Statesman on Tuesday, January 25. After recounting the highlights of his life, from his military service to founding KBVO, it continued with a tribute from Celeste: “You were a truly gifted, generous, and strong man. You were my darling husband and you brought nothing but joy to my life, and I will love you and miss you forever.” Visitation began at two that afternoon and continued until nine that evening. Celeste didn’t attend.
“Don’t tell anyone, even Kristina, that I wasn’t there,” she told Jennifer. “They’ll just all think I left, that they missed me.”
Jennifer did as she was told, even taking Steve’s yellow rose boutonniere to the funeral home for Celeste. Jennifer rarely questioned her mother, and now she didn’t ask what was so important that she couldn’t go to her own husband’s wake.
At the funeral home, Jennifer looked down at Steve’s kind face in the casket. He looked so alive that she thought he must have been breathing. For a moment she waited, hoping he’d sit up and talk to her, or just open his eyes. Jen held the boutonniere in her hands but couldn’t bring herself to pin it on the sweater Celeste had chosen for him to wear, a gift they’d brought back from Australia. Instead, one of the funeral home attendants pinned it on while Jennifer sat by herself and cried over the second father she’d lost in three years.
As guests arrived, Kristina acted as hostess. The twins had rarely seen Amy since the shooting, but she came, as did Justin’s family. Many of Steve’s friends were there, including his employees from KBVO. Kristina handled the day like she’d handled much of her life with her mother: She tried not to think too carefully about any of it. Stunned, she talked to people and circulated through the crowd.
Making matters even more uncomfortable was the worry about what the people walking in were thinking. Along with the obituary, an article on Steve’s death had run in the Statesman that morning. In it, Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo announced the autopsy results: pulmonary embolism, a blood clot to the lungs, caused by months of inactivity. Bayardo ruled the blood clot a complication of the gunshot and listed the cause of death as homicide.
On the day of the funeral, Celeste went to Tramps to have her hair styled into a chic French twist. She brought Dawn Madigan with her. In the salon, her hairdresser, Denise, watched as Celeste pawed through the accessories and knickknacks. She carried them up to the counter by the handful. When they’d all been rung up, she signed a charge slip for $1,000 and handed the overflowing bag to Dawn as a gift. “I don’t know if