Junction City Stories II
Lions Club: Predators and Prey, The Karens of Oak Meadows, and other stories
Chapter Seventeen: Karen/Kim White
I. The Queen of Cul-de-Sac Perdition
Kim White, née Witherspoon – as if that aristocratic surname might buffer the karmic bludgeoning she’d accrued – lived in a beige McMansion in an HOA-governed cul-de-sac named Oak Meadows, where there were no meadows and no oaks had grown since Nixon resigned. Her home, which she described to every DoorDash driver as “the big one with the tasteful flags,” was painted in the sort of eggshell that screamed generational wealth without ever having to earn it. Kim hadn’t worked a day in her life, unless one counts “raising children” – a euphemism here meaning periodically yelling at them while sipping from a Yeti tumbler labeled “Mommy’s Juice.”
At sixty-six, Kim was taut of face but slack of conscience. She maintained her visage through quarterly Botox appointments (Dr. Lance in Suite B, the one who didn’t ask questions and accepted Zelle), a strict avoidance of natural sunlight, and a skincare routine that included creams named after endangered species and morally ambiguous minerals. Her mouth, often puckered in disapproval or ready to utter “I’m not racist, but—”, could frown in twelve directions.
Her legacy was a kind of cultural pollution. Kim White had spent a lifetime perfecting the art of being insufferable. Her hobbies included: reporting children for “playing suspiciously,” enforcing leash laws with the zeal of a mall cop on Adderall, and posting “just asking questions” on Facebook regarding local school drag story hours. She had the spiritual constitution of a can of Diet Dr. Pepper left open in the sun.
Everyone hated her.
Except, of course, the Inner Circle: a gathering of equally calcified Karenites who congregated at First Grace Presbyterian every Sunday in hats like weaponized satellites. It was here Kim found her audience, her validation, and – during the 2008 election – her raison d’être: registering the entire congregation to vote under the church’s address in order to help defeat Proposition 8B, a local ordinance that would have allowed same-sex couples to cohabitate. “It’s about protecting the children,” she had said, without irony, in between sips of lukewarm Maxwell House and bites of a donut that had been purchased with church petty cash.
She decorated her home in the style of a woman desperately trying to convince everyone, including herself, that her life had meaning: framed vinyls she never listened to, farmhouse signs that said things like “Grateful. Thankful. Blessed.,” and an entire downstairs bathroom devoted to scented candles with names like “Divine Laundry” and “Whispering Birch.”
Her children, two sons and a daughter, visited biannually. Their smiles were pained. Their hugs mechanical. All three had spent years in therapy, parsing out the difference between love and obligation. Still, they came. Some curses are hereditary.
But now, a new force had begun asserting itself into Kim’s perfectly scheduled life: death. Not all at once – no, that would be too merciful – but in drips, like a faucet with a slow leak that eventually floods the kitchen. And for the first time in her Botoxed, pumpkin-spiced, PTA-terrorist existence, she was going to have to take a good, long look in the mirror—one that wasn’t softened by dim lighting or a ring light.
II. The Man on the Bench
It began, as many of Kim White’s paranoias did, at Whole Foods.
She had just purchased a gluten-free frozen quiche (not because she was gluten-free, but because Courtney—no, Coco—once made a passive-aggressive comment about wheat being “colonial”) and was fumbling for her keys when she saw him. An older man, maybe late seventies, with a trench coat that screamed “overdressed or under-hinged,” and the sort of skin tone that could only be described as “stewed.”
He sat on a bench near the cart return, hands folded like a cryptkeeper in repose, watching her.
Kim, who prided herself on being “aware of her surroundings” (code for profiling everyone at the local park), clocked him immediately as “not right.” His posture was too still. His eyes, too unreadable. And he was wearing a fedora. A brown one.
“Pervert,” she muttered to herself, clutching her Coach bag like it contained state secrets.
She hurried to her SUV, parked diagonally across two spaces (to avoid “door dings,” but also, it must be said, to assert dominance). She pulled out, watching the rearview mirror like she was in a spy thriller. The man didn’t move.
But the next day, she saw him again.
This time, he was sitting at the community park, beside the regulation duck pond. He had the same eerie stillness, as though he were part of the bench itself, or an underfunded animatronic from a defunct Disneyland ride.
Kim, walking Pickles the Labradoodle (a dog she resented but used as a prop in holiday cards), tightened her grip on the leash.
“He’s following me,” she hissed to no one.
Pickles, for his part, was more interested in a discarded granola bar wrapper.
The man made no motion, no greeting. Just the eyes, watching.
Kim reported him, of course.
She called code enforcement, the police non-emergency line, and Susan from prayer group (“because women must support one another—especially against predators”). She even posted a blurry photo to the neighborhood Facebook group with the caption:
“Anyone else seen this man lurking? Not to alarm anyone, but I do feel unsafe. Especially as a woman. Alone. In a world like THIS.”
The responses varied.
Susan commented with, “Praying for you, sweetie. Stay armed! 💕🔫”
Denise Goldstein replied, “Looks like my cousin Harold. He has Parkinson’s. Sometimes he just needs to rest. Calm down.”
Kim screenshot Denise’s comment and texted it to the city council president with the caption:
“Antisemitism works in both directions.”
Then the phone calls began.
At first it was silence. Dead air. Kim, never one to wait long in ambiguity, began filling the void with performance.
“Listen here, you creep,” she spat into the receiver. “I am not some lonely old woman, and if you think you can intimidate me, you’ve got another thing coming. I know people on the board. We have security cameras.”
Click.
Two nights later, the same thing.
Silence.
Then, finally, a voice.
Low. Gravelly. Male.
“…Is this…Kimberly White?”
She froze. The way her name sounded on his tongue, like someone squeezing a sponge full of blood.
“Who is this?”
Silence again. Then, click.
She called the police, naturally. The dispatcher said they’d “file a report,” which Kim knew was bureaucratic code for “wait until someone’s dismembered in their foyer.”
She started seeing him everywhere.
At the dry cleaner. In the Safeway parking lot. Once, outside Chair Yoga. Always sitting. Always watching. He never approached, never spoke. But she could feel the air thickening around his gaze. He was studying her, memorizing her routines.
“Single white females are statistically the most targeted,” she said loudly to the lady behind her at Panera, who had not asked.
To bolster her defenses, Kim began carrying a stun gun – purchased from a military surplus website with a banner ad that said “DEFEND YOUR BLOODLINE” – and strategically placing “No Trespassing” signs around her hydrangeas.
The HOA asked her to remove them.
She declined.
Then came the incident.
It was trash day. Kim was outside in her robe – pink satin, mid-thigh, embroidered with the words “Flawless, Thank You” – wrestling with a leaking Hefty bag when she heard footsteps behind her.
She spun.
It was him. On the sidewalk. Standing this time. Closer than he’d ever been.
His face, now visible in full daylight, was somehow worse than she’d imagined. Liver-spotted, cheeks like melted wax, with eyes like sunken marbles. He opened his mouth and said—
“Miss? You dropped this.”
He extended a hand.
In it, a receipt. From Whole Foods. Kim’s name was printed in all caps. “KIMBERLY WHITE.” She must have dropped it that first day, while fumbling for her keys.
She stared.
He smiled, revealing teeth like chipped piano keys. “I meant to return it last week. But I forgot which house was yours.”
Kim blinked. Once. Then again. Like a computer buffering through shame.
“Oh,” she said.
“No need to thank me,” he said, already turning to shuffle off. “I always return what isn’t mine.”
She watched him disappear down the sidewalk like a bag of sadness blown by the wind.
Later that day, she’d lie to Susan and say he’d exposed himself.
It was simpler that way.
III. The Diagnosis and the Disassociation
When Dr. Singh gently told her she had “Stage IV metastatic adenocarcinoma of the pancreas,” Kim blinked once, then twice, like an animatronic owl rebooting. The word “Stage” suggested a performance, and Kim – ever the community-theatre-caliber tragedienne – leaned into it with a tremulous, “But I eat organic!” as if quinoa could de-fang death itself.
Dr. Singh, whose patience was biblical, offered a pamphlet titled What Comes Next: Managing Terminal Illness with Dignity. Kim, insulted by the word “terminal” and personally offended by the use of matte paper, stuffed it into her oversized purse (which smelled vaguely of Altoids and Republican anxiety).
On the drive home, she didn’t cry. That would imply vulnerability. Instead, she stopped at a Starbucks, ordered a venti PSL with four pumps and oat milk – she had recently adopted a vague, performative lactose intolerance – and told the barista, a non-binary teenager named Jax, to “speak up” when they asked for her name.
“It’s Kim. With a K. Not that hard.”
She didn’t leave a tip.
Death, to Kim, felt not tragic, but inconvenient. She had a charity gala in three weeks for “Mothers Against Provocative Halloween Costumes” and she was still feuding with her neighbor, Denise Goldstein, over a Confederate lawn gnome that Kim insisted was “heritage, not hate.”
The audacity of cancer. The utter disrespect.
She told no one at first. Not even the kids. Not her passive-aggressive bridge partner, Susan, or her weekly prayer circle of moral gargoyles in pastel cardigans. No, Kim decided she would handle death as she handled everything else: with denial, passive-aggression, and mild racism.
But the symptoms intruded.
She grew tired, then exhausted. Her skin yellowed like aging Tupperware. Her hands trembled as she adjusted the thermostat – always 68 degrees; she claimed to be “cold-blooded,” like some sort of lizard WASP. She lost weight, though she told herself it was just the intermittent fasting kicking in.
When her daughter, Courtney – now going by Coco and teaching “trauma-informed yoga” in Portland – visited unexpectedly and found Kim passed out on the kitchen floor next to a broken bottle of rosé and a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, the façade cracked.
“You have cancer?” Coco asked, horrified, holding an ice pack to Kim’s forehead and trying not to judge the cabinetry.
“Don’t be dramatic,” Kim hissed, from the tiles. “It’s not contagious.”
IV. The Children File In
The family meeting took place around the cherrywood dining table, a massive, gleaming surface that had seen more veiled threats than shared meals. Kim had once called it “an heirloom,” though no one could recall which ancestor had bequeathed it, unless Wayfair counted.
She sat at the head like a wilting monarch, draped in a fleece throw patterned with cardinals – “for the Lord,” she claimed, though it came from TJ Maxx. Her eyes darted between her adult children with the same strategic calculation she once used to divide punishments.
Coco, born Courtney, now legally changed because “the name felt like a wound,” was perched on a dining chair that might as well have been a spike rack. She wore loose, linen layers – Portland camouflage – and her eyes flicked constantly to the exits like a hostage in a cult documentary. She had brought her own mug of herbal tea, unwilling to touch anything in the house after once finding a half-melted Trump candle in the dishwasher.
Chad, the youngest, looked like a Hot Topic manager who read Sartre recreationally. He had a half-dyed man bun, three piercings, and a visible “mom” tattoo on his left forearm – though it was crossed out with a line of barbed wire. He was the most fragile of the three, having borne the brunt of Kim’s attention after the divorce, which she had referred to for years as “the betrayal” and later as “God’s way of testing her resolve.”
Trevor arrived late, which had once earned him slaps and now earned him icy looks. He was dressed for a business lunch that would never happen, all navy blazer and hollow ambition. He brought a Bluetooth headset to the table and didn’t take it off – possibly to imply he was too important for this, or perhaps so he wouldn’t have to hear Kim.
Kim waited until all three had settled before delivering the news.
“I’m dying,” she announced, as though it were a hostile corporate acquisition.
The silence that followed was so absolute, you could hear Pickles the Labradoodle licking his own genitals in the next room.
“Well,” said Trevor, not looking up from his phone, “that’ll clear your schedule.”
“I have pancreatic cancer,” Kim said more slowly, annoyed at the lack of immediate wailing.
Coco put her mug down. “How long have you known?”
“Not long. Just a few weeks. I didn’t want to alarm anyone.”
Coco looked at her flatly. “You once called the police because I didn’t answer your texts for two days. You left a voicemail saying I’d probably been ‘kidnapped by lesbians.’”
“I was worried,” Kim sniffed.
“You were the lesbian,” Chad muttered.
“That’s slander.”
Trevor finally spoke. “So…what do you want from us?”
Kim blinked. “To be remembered fondly.”
The statement hit the table like a wet corpse.
“You abused us,” Coco said, calm as a surgeon.
Kim looked wounded. “That’s not fair.”
“You locked me out of the house for wearing a rainbow bracelet.”
“You were twelve and hormonal.”
“You called Trevor a ‘little bitch’ because he cried when the dog died.”
Kim looked at Trevor. “You did cry. It was embarrassing.”
“I was eight,” Trevor said coldly.
Kim turned to Chad. “At least you understand. We were close.”
Chad gave a laugh that was more like a cough. “You once told my prom date she looked like she ‘had a complicated relationship with carbohydrates.’”
“You never liked any of my friends,” Kim added, turning on Coco again.
“You called one of them a ‘BIPOC’ and then winked like it was a slur.”
“I said it nicely!”
“You once told me if I married a Black man I’d ‘ruin the family Christmas card.’”
Kim opened her mouth, closed it, then said, “I wasn’t well at the time. I was drinking.”
“You always drank,” Chad said. “You just tried to make it look classy with the wine charms.”
Kim turned to the kitchen window, gazing out at the lawn like a woman waiting for her redemption to arrive via Amazon Prime.
“Fine,” she said finally. “I suppose I wasn’t perfect.”
“Perfect?” Coco barked a laugh. “You were a sociopath in cardigans. You didn’t raise children, you performed motherhood like it was an MLM pitch.”
“I cared,” Kim said, her voice rising. “I sacrificed!”
“You sacrificed our childhoods to your ego.”
Another silence. Chad stirred it.
“I remember,” he said softly, “when I came out at sixteen. You threw away all my clothes and told me gay men who wore skinny jeans got murdered in alleyways.”
“I was protecting you!”
“You handed me a copy of Left Behind and told me Jesus would ‘sort it out.’”
Kim wrung the edge of her shawl. “Do you all just…sit around remembering ways I failed you?”
“No,” said Trevor. “We sit around remembering how hard we worked to unlearn you.”
Coco stood, then paused.
“Do you want treatment?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want forgiveness?”
Kim blinked. “I want…to not be the villain.”
Too late.
They didn’t hug. No one held her hand. Chad offered to mow the lawn. Coco collected the mug she had brought. Trevor took a work call as he walked out.
Only Pickles stayed behind, licking crumbs from the floor like none of it mattered.
V. Flashbacks and Fantasies
In the weeks that followed, as hospice care crept in like mildew, Kim began to remember things. Not in the misty-eyed, sepia-toned way Hallmark films advertise, but in snatches, like bad trailers for worse movies.
She remembered screaming at a teenager in a Target parking lot because his music was “too urban.” She remembered slapping Coco across the mouth at fourteen for wearing eyeliner. She remembered flipping a waitress off when her Cobb salad arrived with bacon, despite her “dietary preferences” being entirely mood-dependent.
Her life was a well-lit CVS of pettiness and vitriol, each aisle stocked with microaggressions and self-pity. She had no actual friends, just co-conspirators in bitterness.
One night, alone in bed and increasingly translucent, she fantasized about her funeral.
She pictured Coco sobbing at the altar, giving a speech titled “My Mother, My Compass.” Trevor would post a LinkedIn tribute that went viral. Chad might even record a tribute TikTok. Someone would say “she was complicated” with just enough tremble in their voice.
She clutched this delusion like a rosary.
**
In one memory, Kim stood firm. Coco was sixteen. “Courtney,” then, still pre-linen, pre-Portland, pre-therapy. She had come home with a tiny, barely visible stud in her left nostril. Kim lost her mind.
“I’m not running a halfway house for deviants!” she’d screamed. She made Courtney scrub the bathroom grout as punishment, while playing a loop of Focus on the Family tapes at full volume.
In the actual memory, Coco had cried – softly, the way girls do when they’ve learned it’s dangerous to cry too loud. Kim had blocked the front door until she promised to take it out.
But in Kim’s version, she had rescued her daughter from facial mutilation and a lifetime of tattoo parlors and Marxist book clubs.
“I was firm,” she muttered to herself now, lying in bed, chewing an antacid. “That’s what mothers do. It builds character.”
**
Trevor had been ten. He wanted a sleepover party. Kim refused—she didn’t trust other people’s children, and she certainly didn’t want them tracking mud through her carpets.
He cried. She slapped him. Not hard, just enough to remind him that feelings had consequences.
“It was a different time,” Kim whispered to no one now, as the oxygen machine whirred like a judgmental aunt. “Discipline was love.”
In her rewritten version, Trevor had become a successful financial planner precisely because she’d toughened him up. She often told people he had a “strong sense of boundaries,” without acknowledging that those boundaries began as trauma walls built from fear.
**
Olive Garden. 2009. The server was young, polite, and possibly not white. What Kim remembered clearly was that her alfredo had congealed slightly and the girl hadn’t smiled enough.
So Kim left a handwritten note on the receipt:
“Smile more. You’re lucky to have a job. Also, tip = performance, not entitlement.”
Then she left 78 cents in change.
Now, in bed, Kim frowned. “I was trying to help her grow. They don’t teach manners anymore.”
She imagined the girl later becoming a CEO, telling Forbes that a mysterious angel customer had once inspired her to chase excellence.
And then there were the fantasies.
When the memories grew too inconvenient, Kim switched tracks, creating elaborate internal montages of her funeral. Not the messy parts, not the dying, but the glorious send-off. It became her mental safe room.
In her fantasy, the church is packed. Overflow seating. Pastor Dale weeps at the podium. Susan from prayer circle has to be helped out by Lorraine because she “just can’t go on.”
Coco delivers a stirring eulogy, saying, “My mother was complicated—like the sea. Beautiful. Dangerous. Full of mystery…and things that could kill you.”
Trevor closes his laptop and weeps openly, at last admitting that Kim’s “tough love” made him the apex predator he is today.
Even Chad, in this fantasy, removes his barbed-wire tattoo with a pocket knife and whispers, “You were right, Mom. Masculinity is under attack.”
At the burial, a mysterious stranger approaches the casket and leaves a single white rose, saying nothing. Later, it’s revealed he was an estranged child Kim secretly sponsored in Paraguay. His name is Alejandro. He becomes a doctor. He names a clinic after her.
Back in her bed, eyes barely open, Kim mouths the words, “The Kim White Center for Traditional Values.”
In reality, she hasn’t bathed in four days. The house smells faintly of vanilla-scented Lysol and dying hope. Moira, the hospice nurse, has started bringing her toddler along because she can’t afford daycare anymore. Kim refers to him only as “the wailer.”
Her skin is yellowing. Her breath smells faintly of battery acid and Red Vines. She has started forgetting things, like which son was gay and which one sold vapes, and whether or not she ever apologized to her own mother, who died estranged and under hospice care herself.
“Life is a cycle,” she muttered once, looking at a ceiling fan that wasn’t spinning. “And I’ve closed the loop.”
No one knew what she meant.
Not even her.
VI. Church Lady
When the news broke – via Coco’s bitter but grammatically pristine Facebook post that read simply “My mom is dying. No condolences, please. Just thoughts and accountability.” – Kim’s beloved church community responded exactly as one would expect, with lasagna, platitudes, and unsolicited prayer.
First Grace Presbyterian was a large, beige, aggressively air-conditioned church with a sprawling parking lot and a donation kiosk that accepted Apple Pay. It was the spiritual home of roughly four hundred aging white people who didn’t believe in climate change, systemic racism, or jeans in church.
Kim was something of a celebrity within its walls. She hadn’t missed a Sunday since 1983, even when she had shingles. “God gave me the strength and the foundation to wear concealer.” She organized the Easter brunch, the annual Women of Grace Conference (this year’s theme: Silencing the Jezebel Within), and once led a successful petition to have a gay choir director quietly reassigned to “missions.”
She was a pillar. A starch-white, heavily shellacked pillar.
So of course, when word got out that Kim was terminal, the congregation activated like a swarm of sanctimonious ants.
First came the casserole cavalry.
It started with Susan, who arrived unannounced holding a Pyrex dish of “creamy chicken surprise” and a gallon-sized Ziplock full of pamphlets titled Surrendering Your Diagnosis to the Divine.
“We’re all devastated,” Susan said, stepping over a pile of unopened Amazon boxes. “You’re so strong. You’ve always been strong. Remember when Denise tried to bring quinoa to the potluck and you said something? That was brave.”
Kim, weak and jaundiced but still capable of cruelty, whispered, “Quinoa is socialism in grain form.”
They laughed.
Over the next week, the food flooded in: tuna casseroles, green bean mush, and one suspiciously dense meatloaf from Lorraine that Kim insisted “tasted like betrayal.”
They filled her fridge, her freezer, and a section of the guest bathtub.
Moira, the hospice nurse, quietly donated most of it to a nearby shelter when Kim wasn’t looking.
Pastor Dale came by with his usual weaponized warmth. A tall man with a perma-smile and the emotional depth of a coffee filter, he sat beside Kim’s bed and read from his weathered copy of Heavenly Transitions: A Journey to God’s Open Arms, which he insisted was “non-denominational but biblically sound.”
Kim, halfway through a fentanyl patch and a Chardonnay spritzer, nodded piously.
“Do you feel ready?” he asked gently.
“To meet Him?” she said, placing one trembling hand over her laminated copy of her will. “I’ve been ready since the Obama administration.”
Pastor Dale, unsure if that was political or spiritual, nodded with pastoral vagueness.
He offered to anoint her with oil.
“Will it stain?” she asked.
The Inner Circle: Susan, Lorraine, Donna Mae, and Barb – all women with increasingly southern names and increasingly judgmental eyebrows – descended upon Kim’s home one Thursday morning armed with a CD boombox playing instrumental Michael W. Smith and a full gallon of Costco-brand anointing oil labeled “Organic Blend for Holy Touch.”
“We felt the Spirit prompting us,” Lorraine said, pulling out a folding chair.
They formed a circle around Kim’s hospice bed, which had been wedged into her once-pristine sunroom, now slightly faded and smelling faintly of expired lotion and taxidermy.
“Lord,” Barb began, raising her palms to the popcorn ceiling, “we lift up our sister Kim. Your humble servant. Your warrior queen.”
Kim, eyes fluttering from the meds, smiled weakly.
“We rebuke this cancer, Lord,” Susan shouted. “And any Jezebel spirits hiding in her colon!”
“It’s pancreatic,” whispered Coco from the kitchen.
“We declare HEALING!” Donna Mae thundered.
Moira turned up the oxygen machine to drown it out.
They sang a hymn. Someone tambourined. At one point, Lorraine began speaking in tongues, though it later turned out she was having a mild stroke.
Afterward, Kim thanked them with the exaggerated humility of someone accepting an honorary doctorate.
“You’ve all done so much,” she croaked. “I don’t deserve it.”
Susan grasped her hand tightly. “You do. You’re a Proverbs 31 woman. You’ve kept the home, rebuked the gays, and never once missed the potluck.”
Tears welled in Kim’s eyes. Whether they were from the emotion or the acid reflux was unclear.
Word of Kim’s condition galvanized the more conspiratorially inclined members of the congregation, who saw her illness as evidence of spiritual warfare. She became a martyr-in-progress – the Devil’s latest target. Soon, church bulletins included vague prayer requests like, “A dear sister in Christ battling illness brought on by a culture of moral decay.”
Some took it further. Dale quietly mentioned a group was planning to dedicate this year’s Christmas pageant to “Miss Kim,” complete with a living nativity and a dramatic reading of her Facebook posts – “just the inspiring ones”.
They asked if she’d like to record a video message for the youth group.
“I can’t even move,” she said.
“Even better,” Dale replied. “It’ll show you’re trusting God.”
Kim felt famous. Revered. Vindicated.
It didn’t matter that most of these people didn’t actually like her. That many remembered the time she called the youth pastor a “pantywaist” for playing Hillsong. That she once circulated a petition to ban interracial marriage counseling books from the church library.
Now she was the blessed dying one. The hero. The tragic vessel for God’s mysterious timing.
For the first time in her life, she was getting what she always wanted: Attention without accountability.
VII. The Final Exit
Kim White died on a Tuesday morning, as blandly as she had lived, between Fox & Friends segments and before her hospice nurse, Moira, could finish her breakfast croissant.
Moira found her slumped slightly to the left, one hand resting on a sticky devotional titled Heaven Is for Real (and Republicans). Coco, notified by text, replied with a thumbs-up emoji.
At church that Sunday, Pastor Dale gave a short tribute that included the word “faithful” six times and “gracious” once, though no one could remember an example. A folding table at the back displayed a framed photo of Kim at a Trump rally and an untouched lemon bundt cake with a card that read “From the Women of Grace, RIP to a real one.”
She left behind a mountain of expired supplements, several decades of grudges, and an untouched thank-you note to Moira that simply read “Bless you” with no signature.
There was no real funeral. Just a memorial slideshow that autoplayed on loop in the church vestibule, set to “Wind Beneath My Wings,” until someone unplugged it to make room for the pumpkin raffle.
And just like that, she was gone.
VIII. Epilogue: The HOA Memorializes Her
Three months later, Oak Meadows HOA voted to rename a community bench in her honor.
It now reads:
In Loving Memory of Kim White — Defender of Neighborhood Decorum and Order
No skateboarding.
Teenagers pee on it regularly.
