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Mateo Bridge was good—but would she be found?
    That was a bad thought. Only crumbs and a scant rime of frosting were left of her cake. Who will find me? Ingrid? As if Ingrid didn’t do enough listening as a psychotherapist, the poor woman had listened to her troubles for three years, listened to Katie at 140 pounds larding up to her most recent weigh-in, on a meat-packing scale, of 427. She couldn’t do that to Ingrid, and because Katie had been fired from her Searles sales rep job the month before, it wasn’t like anyone expected her to show up anywhere, except maybe her DBT classes. 11 What would her teacher have to say of her student who gave in to her emotional mind over the supposed reasoning of her wise mind?
    Probably that Katie had left an emotional corpse, but that the HMO had been wise for putting her in therapy and was therefore finished with a job well done.
    That left dying at home in San Bruno and sending a letter to her mother in Sacramento, which made timing tricky. She’d have to do it before her mother could prevent it but not so early that her mother would find her all smelly and puddly.
    Katie shuddered and opened a box of hot cross buns, appropriate for Lent and the fact that she was mourning for two, herself and Christianity.
    More than anything, Katie wanted to have choices, and in a year in which her most favorite thing of all, theme cakes (there was nothing like a bûche de Noël or red velvet Valentine’s Day cake with which to acknowledge a holiday going on outside her apartment), seemed to be on strike, carrot versus banana crunch cake was not a choice. There were no circles on the calendar Katie had not bothered to hang. A calendar meant dates to remember, a future to plan, choices to make between movies or job interviews. Carrot cake, German chocolate cake, coconut cake: they had chosen her, and one would follow upon the other as inevitably as breathing. Instinct would not stop her from eating or inhaling, and in pulling the curtains across the affable warmth of April, she had decided to decide what she could.
    “She claimed her own life,” Katie rehearsed for her hometown newspaper, grimly acknowledging the irony of her words. Death was an action, a choice, a future. She wanted those things more than she wanted a white sheet cake with green coconut frosting and hard sugar shamrocks. She wanted to own her death. She wanted to leave a corpse, and she wanted her family to know she’d done it while trying to protect their feelings. She wanted dignity, and the most dignified suicide she could think of was Ben Kingsley in his general’s uniform, duct-taping a plastic bag around his neck with deft determination at the end of House of Sand and Fog .
    If only she knew what kind of bag he’d used.
    At that, she started to cry some more.
     
     
    Mimi’s knee was killing her. The coed on the Weight Watchers scale was asking a lot of questions about losing more quickly, and Mimi would gladly have smacked her if she could keep her place in the line. Surely the girl would know what was coming if she saw Mimi, stocky as a mushroom in black leggings and a red T-shirt, hobbling out of line and aiming straight for her. Isn’t being here torture enough? she wanted to ask the twentysomething married-with-toddler suburbanite behind her. I have a fifty-hour-a-week job, and you’re raising a kid. Why does trying to lose weight have to be a second career?
    Mimi had skipped breakfast and water, and forgone her warm chenille tunic for this weigh-in on a Saturday morning when she could be preparing for the holidays coming up. That year, April was busier than Christmas, what with the full Pink Moon Esbat just before Easter, and Beltane Sabbat two weeks later. She could be sharing that divine coffee cake and chorizo omelet at the Union with Lilith, showing her one of the dogwood candles she had molded in the sand and pebbles of White Clay Creek. Lilith and her husband had invited Mimi to celebrate the dogwood