Hot Sauce (Suncoast Society #26)(13)

Now she wondered if Jenny and her boyfriend knew more about Tony’s private side than she did.

Tony had once specifically requested that if anything happened to him to let Kelly know as a courtesy more than anything, and to let her attend the private memorial if she wanted. Jenny hadn’t outright asked Vanessa if she was nuts when Vanessa asked her to make the call, but the implication from Jenny’s arched eyebrow had been there.

And, of course, Kelly hadn’t shown up at the service, even though she had been invited.

Again, invited as a courtesy. Had Tony never mentioned it, Vanessa wouldn’t have called the woman in the first place. He hadn’t even wanted his death mentioned in the paper, afraid that it might attract scam artists or identity fraudsters and cause Vanessa even more aggravation and grief.

Fortunately for Vanessa, she knew the password to Tony’s laptop. He’d given that to her a while back when she’d needed to use his after her personal laptop had to go into the repair shop for a bad screen. From there, she knew she could get any passwords she didn’t have, because she had access to his e-mail.

She started by scanning his e-mail, deleting spam, and looking for subscriber lists he was a member of and how to unsubscribe him. No use in that just pilling up, more busy work for her to remind her of his absence.

There were only a couple of personal e-mails in there, including one from a day before he died, a guy she knew, and whom she knew had been at the funeral, so no reason to e-mail him.

Then…

Facebook.

Fortunately, he’d saved the password in memory and she didn’t need to go through the recovery process to get a new one.

He’d been very active on the site, had nearly maxed out his number of friends there. She’d asked people not to talk about his death on Facebook or post on his wall, and from the lack of postings apparently they’d honored her request. She had a Facebook account, but she rarely used it and only had a couple dozen friends—including Tony—on her account.

After taking a deep breath she started composing her update.

This is Vanessa Riddick, Tony’s sister. I’m sorry to have to break the news like this, and I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to do this sooner, but Tony died late last Friday night. Our parents flew in from Seattle for the funeral, which we had on Monday. He didn’t want a big service, and he was cremated. I’m sorry I didn’t make the announcement on here ahead of time, but that was by his request. His passing was very sudden and unexpected and has, honestly, torn my life apart. If you knew him personally, you knew how close we were, and this has shattered my world. Please, if you’re sick, don’t wait. Go to the doctor. He thought he had bronchitis or something, and it turned out it was pneumonia. By the time I finally forced him to let me take him to the ER, it was too late, and he died a few hours later.

After reading through it several times and tweaking it, she finally hit the post button.

Then she closed the laptop, curled up on her side with Carlo, and sobbed.





An hour later, after a long walk with Carlo and more pressing chores like checking her own work e-mail, cleaning out dryer lint, and rearranging her pantry, she dared to open Tony’s laptop again and found over a hundred and rapidly growing comments to her post, including dozens of PMs to his account with messages of condolence and volunteering to organize a local get-together in his memory.

Realizing there would be nothing but mass confusion unless she made a decision, she composed a second post.

This is Vanessa again. Thank you for all the messages. Several people have asked about organizing a get-together. He did say in his instructions he was okay with his friends doing that after the fact, but he’d wanted his actual funeral service to be very small. Honestly, my brain is fried and I can’t do it. Please talk about it in this post and feel free to make the arrangements here and organize it. I’m sorry I’m not up for doing that, but I know you all will understand. And please let me know the plans, because I’d like to attend.

She retrieved her own laptop and when she opened her Facebook account, she found she had several messages there, too, because Tony had her listed as family on his profile.

They were mostly from people she actually knew in real life, or had heard about through Tony’s stories or discussions in passing, so she went ahead and approved all of them without bothering to check them out more thoroughly.

They were a connection to her brother. No, she might not have much contact with any of them after the flurry of activity was over, but it was a tenuous thread she didn’t want to ignore.

She’d once asked him why he spent so much time on Facebook, either on his laptop or phone or iPad.

“I stay connected with my friends,” he’d said. “I can’t always get together with them, but I can keep up with them.”

“But you have so many.”

“I group them. People I know in real life, I sort them that way.”

That jogged her memory. Back to his laptop, and sure enough, there she saw where he had done just that. That whittled the number of real-life “friends” down to less than two hundred.

That she could understand.

The sad fact didn’t escape her that she knew well over that many people, through the employees in the stores under her, but most of them weren’t even acquaintances, much less “friends.”

I really am pitiful.