“So am I,” Olivia said, crying openly. They both were.
“She loved you. She thought you were terrific,” he said.
“What can I do to help?” she offered. She didn’t want to cross any lines. She knew how private he was, but he sounded lost, which wasn’t like him. And he needed a friend now, not an employer.
“I’ll take care of it. I need to get everything organized. She’s at the funeral home now,” he said, pulling himself together.
“Can I do any of it for you?” she offered again.
“No. I’ll let you know what I’m doing. Maybe we can have lunch afterward.”
“If there’s a service, I’d like to go.” She could hear that he was crying when he answered her.
“I’m not sure. She had kind of her own arrangement with God. I don’t want to do anything she wouldn’t have wanted. I suppose I’ll bury her next to Javier. She’d like that. Francois was buried with his own family in Brittany, so I can’t put her with him. I still can’t believe she’s gone.” Neither could Olivia. She had seemed so vital and alive only weeks before.
“Maybe she felt she had done everything she was here to do,” Olivia said gently. But Joachim still needed her. They loved each other.
“Maybe so,” he said, and they hung up a few minutes later. He texted her that night that the service was going to be in a small church near his mother’s apartment, and then she would be buried next to Javier. He said that her colleagues from work were going to come, and a few of her remaining friends. He said he thought his mother would like it if Olivia was there. He was especially glad now that Olivia had met her.
She wrote back that she would like to come, if it wasn’t an intrusion. He didn’t answer for a long time, while he wrestled with the response and didn’t know what to say. He finally typed it out slowly half an hour later, weighing every word. Words were dangerous, they could commit you, and attach you to people, or hurt them. He looked at the message he had written, was satisfied with it, and finally pushed the send button. He knew his mother would have approved of what he’d written.
“I need you there with me. Please come.” He had never felt so naked in his life or so scared after he wrote it to her, and she responded immediately.
“I’ll be there. I’m here if you need me. Call anytime.”
He didn’t write to her again. She saw him as soon as she walked into the small church, holding a small white bouquet. He was wearing one of his dark suits, impeccably groomed, and his eyes met Olivia’s as she walked down the aisle toward him, and slipped into a pew, halfway down the church aisle, not too close to the front, since she didn’t know his mother well, and wanted to respect Joachim’s need for space and boundaries.
He came to find her a few minutes later. “Will you sit with me?” he asked in a whisper. She stood up and followed him to the front pew. The casket was in front of the altar. He hadn’t had her cremated. It was a simple, unpretentious white wood casket, and seemed right for Liese.
There were about thirty people in the church, and Joachim didn’t know many of them. He whispered to Olivia before the service started. “My mother and I came so far together. The years in Buenos Aires, and then we came here…Francois…She was so brave. She always moved forward. She never looked back. No matter what happened, she always kept going.” Without thinking, he had laced his fingers into Olivia’s. “I’ve never been as brave as she was.”
“Yes, you have. You just don’t realize it,” she whispered. Olivia could feel Liese there with them, and she could feel her love for her son, and so could he.
The service was very brief. He shook hands afterward with the people who had come, whether he knew them or not. They each had something nice to say about his mother, and how extraordinary she was. He remembered how she had insisted on meeting Olivia. He wondered if she had sensed what was coming even then, and wanted to see Olivia before she left. She had always been intuitive, as well as wise.