The chair was still in the corner of the living room when they all arrived, which Wren had thought would be the hardest thing, but wasn't. The hardest thing was the smell of the room when she first walked in: wool and paper and something medicinal she couldn't name, the smell of him being somewhere for a long time. She filed this away and got through the rest of the afternoon all right.
She cried at the cemetery and then finished. She was good at this, or she told herself she was good at this, which was a form of being good at it.
At the reception a woman sat next to her on the couch in the corner. Wren didn't know her, a former colleague of her father's she thought, someone who had known him in a different chapter. The woman had been crying recently; her eyes were still swollen. Wren thought she should say something and couldn't think of anything.
Then the woman touched Wren's wrist, once, briefly. And Wren started crying again. Not from the touch. The touch was just a door.
The woman said something. Wren heard it as: you put him in your pocket when you were small and he has stayed there, even though your pocket has gotten very full. Which was not the kind of thing anyone said in English. But she understood it perfectly and completely, the way you understand the layout of a room you've lived in for years in complete darkness.
"I know, " Wren said. She meant: yes, and the fullness of the pocket is its own thing now. She felt this as language, precise and available, and she said it, and the woman nodded.
They sat for a while in this. Other people moved around them.
Then Wren noticed the woman was no longer crying. And the language was gone, not faded but simply absent, the way a smell is absent once your nose has adjusted. Wren was still crying slightly, still on the edge of it, and she started to ask something, two words, and stopped. The language was not there anymore. She was back in English, which had only its own words for what she meant.
The woman looked at her gently. "Yes, " she said. It was the ordinary English yes, the one that could mean many things.
They sat a few minutes more. Then the woman went to find something to eat. Wren sat with her father in her pocket, where he had been all her life, and would be for whatever came next.