Free The Funeral Singer by Linda Budzinski Page B

Do you print up posters and buttons?”
    “Don’t worry, you’ve got this,” Lana said. “Hannah Massey and Molly Gibbons? Please. Total lightweights. All we need to do is get you a date. And a dress.”
    The dress would be easy. Anything but black. The date? Not so much.
    Lana read my mind. “Don’t even. You have guys lining up to take their picture with you. One of them will eventually ask you. Better yet, you should ask one of them. What about Ryan Dent? Or … ” her eyes grew wide. “What about Zed Logan?”
    I grinned. “Maybe.”
    I popped the last bite of pizza into my mouth and thought about Zed almost holding my hand the other night. Did I dare dream of asking him? It was such a long shot, but who knew? A week ago, the chances of me being nominated prom queen were a million to one. Stranger things had been known to happen.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    Elliott Grayson was laid out in an Orthodox Jewish casket, though he was neither. He’d wanted to minimize his carbon footprint, even in death, so he picked a natural, all-wood box. Had he come to Martin’s in the first place, my father could have shown him several eco-friendly options, but he made his original arrangements with O’Hara’s. Apparently Orthodox Jewish was as exotic as you could get over there.
    To the delight of Delilah Grayson, Elliott’s widow, Dad had come up with a bunch of other ways she could make his funeral green, too. A sugar maple seedling planted in his memory over at Whitney State Forest, programs printed on ninety-eight percent recycled paper, locally grown organic flowers in the funeral sprays and even formaldehyde-free embalming.
    To me, green funerals made sense—the cycle of nature, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that. Still, while I appreciated Mrs. Grayson’s desire to save the earth, I dreaded seeing her song list. Most of Dad’s eco-clients picked ’60s folksongs. Not my forte.
    “I have an odd request, Mel,” Dad said as he printed out the list. We hadn’t spoken much at home since our fight the other night, but this was work. Here he was my boss and I was staff, no different from his driver or his receptionist. “Mrs. Grayson would like you to sing from the front for tomorrow’s service.”
    “From the front?” My breathing grew shallow. “Are you serious? With the family, like, ten feet away from me?”
    Dad grimaced. He knew I’d hate doing this, and he no doubt disliked the idea himself, but he rarely said no to a client. In fact, most of the time he loved special requests. He always said that as long as something could be done without anyone getting hurt or arrested, he’d make it happen.
    I grabbed the song list off the printer and breathed a small sigh of relief. No sign of Peter, Paul, or Mary. They wanted James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and—woohoo—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Just a little crack of the voice at the end of that one—on “Why, oh why, can’t I?”—got them every time. Only problem was, this time I’d be there to witness the tears up close and personal.
    ***
    “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to reap; a time to kill, and a time to heal … ”
    Mr. Grayson’s son, Ed, was reading Ecclesiastes 3, a favorite funeral verse, especially among the environmental crowd, as I got my first look at a funeral from the front of the room. It was not the typical scene, even for a hippie funeral.
    For one thing, at least a dozen of the hundred or so people in the room had videotaped my first song. Of course, my YouTube videos were the reason the Graysons had switched the service here from O’Hara’s in the first place, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. For another thing, Mrs. Grayson, wearing a breezy floral-print sundress and floppy white hat wreathed with fresh petunias, was acting more like a party hostess than a grieving widow. All smiles and hugs and