The memorial was three days later at a house I had never seen.
Thirty people, all of them in clothes for the occasion, and me in my own clothes, which is a distinction I did not understand until I walked in.
His daughter came across that room.
Lisette is forty-five. I had never met her. She had not been in that hospital once in nine days and neither had her brother, and I want to be careful with that fact because I understood a great deal more about it later.
She took hold of my wrist — the one with the strap of that backpack over it — and said it loud enough for every person in that room:
You knew my father nine days. Whatever’s in that bag isn’t yours.
Nobody moved. A man by the window put a glass down on a bookshelf.
She did not let go. She leaned in and said: put the bag down. Well?
I did not put it down and I did not answer her.
What ended it was Ozro Tull.
He is seventy-eight and he had been standing near the door with his briefcase for the whole thing, and he came across that room at the speed a man of seventy-eight comes across a room, which is slowly, and it took about six seconds and nobody said a word for any of them.
He did not raise his voice. He said: Lisette. Let go of her arm.
And she did.
Then he said, to the room rather than to her: the bag was given under instruction and I witnessed it, and anybody who has a question about that can put it to me in writing.
Then he turned to me and asked whether I would like to sit down, and I said no, and he said: then I’ll walk you to your car.
We were out of that house in ninety seconds.
In the drive he stopped and said one thing that I did not understand for months.
He said: I’m sorry. I told him not to do it like this.
I said do what like this.
And he said: any of it.
What I want to say about Lisette and Aurel, having now spent fourteen months opposite them in various rooms, is that the thing they contested was never the money.
There is money and there is a great deal of it and none of it came to me — the estate went where he had directed it years earlier, to his children and to two institutions, and I signed a waiver in the January that Ozro drafted and that I did not argue about for one minute.
What they contested was the bag.
And they contested it because they had spent their entire lives being arranged by that man, exactly the way I had been arranged in nine days, and because the very last thing he did on this earth was arrange one more person and hand her a rucksack.
Lisette said something to me in the corridor outside a mediation room in the May that reorganised the whole of it for me.
She said: he never once said sorry to us either.
Then she said: he just kept fixing things.
We are not friends. We speak, now, about four times a year, and it is careful and it is about paperwork and it is more than I expected.
Aurel has never spoken to me and I do not expect him to.
He came to one mediation in the February and said eleven words in ninety minutes and then did not come again, and I have been told by Lisette that he has not been able to go into that house since.
There is a thing about those two that I did not understand at the memorial and understand completely now.
Neither of them knew their father was in that hospital.
He had told them he was at a clinic in another state. He had been telling them that, on and off, since the June, and they had believed it because he had been doing exactly that kind of thing to them for forty years.
So when Lisette Renner crossed a room and took hold of my wrist in front of thirty people, she had found out eleven hours earlier that her father had died two miles from her house, in a room she could have driven to, holding the hand of a twenty-nine-year-old she had never heard of.
I did not know that when she said it. I thought she was defending an estate.
She was standing in a room full of people who had all just found out the same thing, and the only available object in that room was me, and I had a rucksack.
I would have said something considerably worse.
PART 6
