LA CONNER — By the time she was 8, Shayla Martin already was helping around the family restaurant, a Pizza Pete, in Mount Vernon.
She’d sweep the carpet, wipe down tables and bring dirty dishes to her oldest sister working in the back.
Years later, after she graduated from high school in 1981, Martin asked if she could move in with her sister who was living in Lake Stevens. That was fine with Karen Van Horn. By then, they were working with their dad at another family-owned restaurant, Addie’s Pantry, in north Everett. Dad cooked, Van Horn was a hostess and Martin waited tables.
Van Horn remembers the day they went to visit a friend whose cat had recently delivered kittens.
“Can’t we just bring one home,” her sister pleaded.
“No,” Van Horn said. “We don’t need any pets.”
That day, they brought home two cats.
Shayla Martin had a knack for convincing her sister to do things. When Martin was a baby, Van Horn, who is six years older, would crawl into the crib and comfort her when she cried or fussed at night.
More recently, on Sept. 22, Van Horn called as she often did to check in with her sister. They’d been through a lot in the past year — the deaths of their middle sister and their widowed father.
Van Horn’s last words in the conversation were that she loved her. The next evening, Martin was one of five people shot and killed inside a Macy’s department store in the Cascade Mall in Burlington. Martin worked at cosmetics counter at a store where she had been employed for a quarter century.
Van Horn, a longtime employee of The Daily Herald, told roughly 300 people at a memorial service Saturday that she is thankful that her last words to her sister expressed her love.
The service on a stage inside the LaConner Elementary School gym was a mix of laughter and sharing of grief, a trove of treasured family photos and heart-felt anecdotes. More than half the people worked either at Macy’s or Estee Lauder, whose products Martin cheerfully sold.
The focus Saturday was on how she lived, not the tragic circumstances of her death. The gathering included police officers, Congresswoman Suzan DelBene, friends, neighbors and co-workers. It featured a tribal song, a soothing harp and prayer.
Tribute also was paid to the other victims: Belinda Galde, 64, an Arlington woman and county probation officer; Galde’s mother, Beatrice Wilson-Dotson, 95; Boeing worker and Lake Stevens resident Chuck Eagan, 61; and Sarai Lara, 16, a student at Mount Vernon High School.
Larry Young, a former brother-in-law and friend to Martin, told the gathering: “Unfortunately, it seems we live in a time in which there are too many people who are turning to hate instead of embracing love, too many who are raising their hands in anger instead of laughing, smiling and nurturing, and too many who see only darkness instead of dancing in the light. Shayla always laughed, smiled, nurtured and loved.”
Young said he believes Martin is still dancing in the light, “maybe only in our memories, maybe only in our hearts, but she still loves nonetheless.”
Martin’s daughter, Tanya Young, recalled how her mother was there to console her in the same LaConner gym many years ago when her first band concert didn’t go well.
“It’s okay,” she remembered her mother telling her. “I don’t think any seventh grader is going to master the saxophone.”
Young said she could feel the love and compassion of her mother’s friends and family and see it in the eyes of those who attended Saturday’s service.
“She was a wonderful woman,” she said.
Martin, 52, was a tomboy as a child, twirling on any bar she could find. She was excited to get her first pair of go-go boots one Christmas.
As an adult, she was a frequent visitor of garage sales and thrift stores.
She was remembered as a crazy-about-cats lady who’d wear Seattle Seahawks blue on Fridays. She could bake a fine apple pie and a tasty goulash. She’d often say, “Suck it up, Buttercup.”
She was remembered as someone who wanted to help others, once spending an hour teaching the fine art of applying makeup and buoying the spirits of a depressed and bullied 8-year-old girl. On her own time, she would bring products to her customers who could no longer drive.
Her life, said Pastor Ron Deegan, was about “making people (feel) beautiful inside and out.”
Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446; stevick@heraldnet.com.
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