Please?” Any of it. He wouldn’t have wanted to be seen. He said a while back that when he died he only wanted to be burned without any mumbo jumbo and his ashes trashed. His mother was the one who wanted it opened. After it was closed a final time she said to Olivia’s mother “Why? I didn’t need to be shown he was gone. Because it had been done for his father and my parents and sisters and brothers, so I thought why not for him, but it was just repeating past mistakes. I should have given in to you. You shouldn’t have given in to me. If I still insisted, slobbering over your knees even, you should have told me to stop instantly or leave. It’s something I’ll never live down for the rest of my life. Married to Howard even for a few years, you should know how much stubbornness runs on both sides of his family and how we don’t mind walking over weaker wills, and that’s all you needed to have told me. A reminder of what I can be. Remember that for the next time. Not for a funeral — the next one will be mine — but any time when I want to get my way. Now let’s try to get through the rest of it.” If her father could think, what would he be thinking now? He can think, that’s all he can do now, except maybe see them from someplace, and he’d be looking at them and probably crying while thinking “Oh my poor children,” meaning Eva and she, “what’s going to happen to you without me? I shouldn’t be dead just for that. And what will I do without you? Well, it’s all got to be planned. You just don’t go to no place after your funeral and do nothing for a billion years. Up there no doubt has something for me to do from now on or else people like me would get tired and bored from doing nothing for so long and then make trouble for the place. Washing clouds. Cleaning air. And lots of enjoyable things to do with a lot of nice people after these chores are done. But it just isn’t fair for me, that’s all. Nor for them. Skip me — just for them. They know I loved them too much for me to just leave them like that. So, settled — it’s all got to change. Anyone can do the things that are planned for me, and besides I’ll have a billion years to do them in. But only I with their mother can take care of our little girls.” He wouldn’t like the chapel either. Too gloomy and uninteresting, just like the awful organ music they played. Wouldn’t have liked the furniture and paintings in the other room where her mother and grandmother and uncle and she saw people before the funeral began. He didn’t like being the center of attention anywhere. He would like it that he isn’t expected to say anything.