The Girl I Used to Be

Olivia goes to the cemetery where her mother is buried. She has some memories of sledding down a nearby hill as a child. She doesn’t consciously remember where her mother’s grave is, so she lets herself wander. The grass is tall, and she steps into a hole and is momentarily frightened about the bodies beneath her feet. When she finds her mother’s grave, there is an unopened bag of Cheetos leaning against the headstone. She remembers visiting the grave with her grandmother and finding that Naomi’s friends left things behind for her during visits: beer, flowers, a tiara.

Standing on the grave is very emotional for Olivia. She lies on the ground and cries for a long time. Suddenly, she has a new memory: her mother holding her and reading her a story. The feel and sound and smell of it all come back to her and she knows “without question [she] was loved” (63). Olivia cries again and falls asleep on the grave. She’s woken by a hand grabbing her shoulder. 

The man touching her is the elderly man who mows the cemetery (Frank). He asks if she’s okay and tells her that he could have missed seeing her in the tall grass and run over her with the mower. She recognizes him from the funeral and asks about Terry and Naomi; he tells her that her parents were very young when they had her and that her mother was beautiful and spirited. He recalls many people leaving gifts behind on the grave during the early days. He offers a theory that Terry and Naomi could have taken someone with them on their trip and that person could be the killer. Olivia wonders whether the person who left the Cheetos could have been the killer and if it could have valuable fingerprints; Frank says the bag was left after they found Terry’s bones.

Olivia goes to the local Fred Meyer store to look for a job. She hopes to transfer to this store from the Burlingame location where she currently works in the deli. The manager tells her he has a produce job open but seems skeptical that she is strong enough to perform the lifting duties. He asks for her current manager’s contact information, and she realizes she needs to call him first so that he isn’t surprised. She worries that he’ll be angry and that she will end up with no job at all.

Olivia visits Lee Realty, the company that manages her grandmother’s property. Richard Lee is the name of one of the men who was at her father’s funeral. She fills out an application and meets with Lee, relieved to find that her name doesn’t ring any bells or connect her in his mind to Ariel. Lee has a number of hesitations and concerns about renting to Olivia, but she talks him out of them, citing her emancipated status, her positive rental history, her active employment, and the quietness of her lifestyle. She uses the house’s dark notoriety as leverage, reminding him that it’s already been empty three months and that most people won’t want to live there. When she realizes she doesn’t have enough money to put down the full deposit, she talks Richard into letting her paint the interior instead of putting down the last month’s rent. Richard asks if she’s sure she doesn’t want to be a realtor after that display of her negotiating skills.