He died on a Tuesday morning, the third of June, at about six-forty. Quietly. Before either of us got there.
She was there. We were not.
Seraphine planned the funeral herself.
“Exactly the way he would have wanted,” she told my aunt on the phone, and my aunt repeated it to me in a tone that carried a great deal.
And not one of us recognized a single choice she made.
The flowers were white stock and eucalyptus. My father liked marigolds. He grew marigolds along the whole south fence for thirty years.
The music was a cello piece I had never heard in my life. My father listened to two things: brass bands and a specific country station out of Winsley.
And the photo on the program was not one any of us would have picked. It was him at maybe fifty, outdoors, squinting, in a coat I didn’t recognize, half-turned away from the camera.
We had four hundred photographs of that man. She chose one where you could barely see his face.
The service was at eleven o’clock on Saturday the seventh of June, at Ozel and Sons.
There were about two hundred people. He was a well-liked man in a small town for a long time.
Seraphine sat in the front row in black Chanel — I am not guessing, my cousin’s wife identified it — with a tissue that she pressed to the corner of each eye at intervals and which never once appeared to be wet.
Lucan and I sat two rows back with our families.
I could feel people looking. That’s not paranoia; my aunt told me afterward it was the main topic in the parking lot. People would glance at her, then back at us, then away.
At about twenty past eleven, in the middle of the second reading, Bertrand Ozel came up the side aisle.
He is seventy-one years old and he has buried most of this town. He moves very slowly and very quietly and he does not interrupt services.
He walked to the front row, crouched down beside Seraphine, and said something in her ear that took about eight seconds.
