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.
And I watched every ounce of color go out of that woman's face in real time.
I want to describe it properly because I have thought about it every day since.
It was not embarrassment. I have seen her embarrassed. It was not anger.
Her mouth opened slightly and she put one hand flat on the pew in front of her like a person on a boat.
And then she shook her head. Twice. Small.
And Bertrand Ozel said something else, and she closed her eyes.
Lucan leaned over to me and said, under his breath, "Here we go."
I want to tell you what I thought was happening, because it's important that you know exactly what kind of person I was in that pew.
I thought she'd been caught.
I genuinely, in that moment, believed that a lawyer had arrived, or a creditor, or a woman from somewhere, and that whatever six years of that marriage had actually been was about to come apart in front of two hundred people at eleven twenty in the morning.
I felt something go up in my chest that I have since had to sit with in a therapist's office.
I was glad.
Then Bertrand Ozel went to the lectern.
He apologized for the interruption. He said that Ozel and Sons had held, since January of 2019, a pre-arranged and pre-paid funeral file in the name of Oswin Ellery.
Pre-arranged. Six and a half years ago.
He said that filed with those arrangements was a sealed envelope, with written instructions that it be opened and read aloud at the service, before the eulogy, in the presence of the family.
He said the envelope had been retrieved from their safe that morning and that he had only in the last few minutes confirmed with the family's attorney that the instruction stood.
Then he said, "Mrs. Ellery has asked me to proceed."
She had said no. That's what the head shake was. She'd said no twice and then she'd closed her eyes and said yes, because a dead man had left a written instruction and she had spent six and a half years doing exactly what he asked.
He read it. It runs to two and a half pages and I have a copy and I am going to give you the parts that matter.
My father wrote it on the fourteenth of January, 2019.
