Chapter 17
Three years after I found my mother inside an open casket, we returned to the chapel for her seventy-fifth birthday blessing.
Her idea.
I called it dramatic.
She called me ungrateful.
Normal.
The room was full.
No black cloth.
No funeral bouquets.
No hidden camera.
The flower stand carried white roses because Agnes liked them, not because anyone had arranged a burial.
Luca sat beside her.
Owen attended in the back row.
Still no command.
Still his son’s father.
Both facts.
Lorenzo did not come.
He sent one card.
Agnes chose not to open it until later.
Her choice.
After the blessing, everyone moved outside for dinner.
I stayed behind for a moment.
On the chapel shelf sat the framed portrait they once placed inside my casket.
Agnes had brought it back.
Of course.
I stared at my own younger face.
Three years earlier, I thought the horror was obvious.
Two coffins.
My mother in one.
My picture in the other.
I thought someone wanted us dead.
They wanted something subtler.
They wanted us declared finished.
Agnes because an older woman who remembered too much complicated Lorenzo’s return.
Me because a woman in command contradicted the story he needed the family to believe.
Owen helped because he feared becoming irrelevant.
Corinne helped because she valued belonging more than another woman’s terror.
Fourteen guests stood because they had been given only the parts of history that served their resentment.
None of it required believing themselves evil.
That was the dangerous part.
People can justify almost anything once they rename control as tradition.
Agnes appeared in the doorway behind me.
“What are you staring at?”
“My funeral portrait.”
“It’s still a good picture.”
I laughed.
She came beside me.
Seventy-five.
Alive.
Still telling me where furniture belonged.
“Do you regret not destroying it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
I thought.
“Because they prepared it to prove I was finished.”
She waited.
“And?”
I picked up the frame.
“Now it proves they were wrong.”
Agnes smiled.
Then took the photograph from my hands.
“Wonderful.”
She carried it toward the door.
“Where are you taking that?”
“My apartment.”
“You already have enough pictures of me.”
“No.”
She looked back.
“I need one for the bathroom.”
I stared.
She kept walking.
My mother had developed an aggressive sense of humor after surviving her own funeral.
I followed her outside.
Luca was laughing with cousins.
Owen stood nearby without directing anyone.
Guests had arranged chairs in a loose circle on the lawn.
No founder seat.
No symbolic throne.
No one waiting to see who sat at the head.
Agnes took the nearest chair.
I sat beside her.
That was all.
Three years earlier, Owen tried to lower a lid over my mother while Corinne told her the family already believed she was dead.
Then they prepared another casket with my face inside.
They expected two funerals to make Rinaldi obedient.
Instead, the coffins buried the only thing that needed to die:
the belief that family tradition gave anyone the right to decide when another person’s voice, choices, or authority were finished.
Agnes reached for cake.
I moved the plate closer.
She looked at me.
“Bianca?”
“Yes?”
“When I really die, make sure the cake is better than this.”
I laughed.
May you like
“Deal.”
This time, when my mother spoke about her own funeral, nobody else got to choose the ending.
