The air was thick as ashen clouds covered the sky. The wind blew heavily, but not enough to dryLalo’s eyes. He pinched the bridge ofhis nose and tensed his whole body as he fought the anger inside himself. With one hand in his pocket and the otherover his mouth, Lalo watched somberly as they lowered acoffee-and-cream-colored casket into a six-foot hole in the ground.
A large painting of a 21-year-old Kat restedon an easel nearby with her favorite lilies cascading around it. “I should’ve never let you do this to yourself,” Lalo whispered to himself.
“It’s not your fault, sweetheart,” a woman said frombehind him. Lalo turned to see an olderwoman gazing up at him from underneath a large, black hat. He looked puzzled since he hadn’t reallyknown any of Kat’s family; he had only heard a few stories here and there.
“What?” he questioned.
“It’s not your fault. Kat was a very, very troubledgirl,” she said.
“How did you know her?”
“I’m sorry; I’m her aunt, Laura. You must be Lalo,”
“How’d you know?”
“Well, Kat didn’t have very many friends after she started all the body changes. Any time I spoke to her—well, whenever she would let me—she always mentioned your name. So, I knew that you had to be her only true friend,”
“I wasn’t that good of a friend. If I was, she never would’ve ended up like this. I should’ve stopped her when I had the chance. Instead, I go with her and it just makes everything worse,” Lalo choked.
“Listen, that girl had problems before she met you. Did you know about her father?” Laura asked.
“She never wanted to talk that much about him. All she told me was that he died and left her his money,”
“Well, Kat’s father, my brother, worked hard all of his life and he became an investment banker shortly after Kat was born. When he decided to start his own firm, his wife at the time, Kat’s mother, said he spent too much time away from her and his daughter.
See, Kat’s mother never wanted children, so much so that she had her tubes tied just to make sure she could never get pregnant. Then Kat came along like the miracle she was and her mother couldn’t stand her very existence. So she put Kat down, told her she would never be anything and called her the ugliest thing she would ever lay eyes on; emphasis on thing because she never called her by her name,”
Lalo winced at her story, but he had to hear it until the end.
“My brother,” she continued, “was the only one in that house who ever called her beautiful. So imagine being alone in a room all day with somebody who wouldn’t even claim you as their child much less call you by your name.
That’s why I chose this photo of her because it was before she had everything done, when she was her most beautiful, naturally. I wanted people to remember her that way and not be reminded of her insecurities. When her father died, he left everything to her in a trust,”
“How did he die?” Lalo asked.
“He was killed...by her mother. She shot him. Everybody knew she was hoping to get his money but he didn’t leave her a dime. She forced Kat to take care of her. So when Kat turned sixteen, she emancipated herself and moved as far away from her as she could without leaving the state.
Losing her daddy was the worst thing to happen to her, and she was always going to have everything her mother said to her in the back of her mind because he wasn’t here anymore to tune it out. She was going to keep up with all the surgeries no matter what you did because it was bigger than you. It was bigger than anything that anybody could have said to her.
There was nothing you could have done differently to make her change her mind about how she lived her life. As long as you loved her, that’s all that matters,” she told him.
“I did,” Lalo nodded, his tears beginning again. “I did love her.” Laura pulled him close and embraced him tightly. While he still wished he would’ve tried a little harder to get through to her, he finally accepted that Kat’s life was meant to be a reminder of how much more beautiful she was on the inside.