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remembers the day her mother came to her to tell her that she was dying. The way, even then, her mother was there so she could lean against her and how then suddenly, everything changed in the next sentence.
    “I need you now,” her mother told her. “I need you like I have never needed anyone, and you have to help me. Be who you are now, baby, be who I taught you to be. This is not going to be easy and I am going to have to lean into you.”
    And she did. Katherine remembers that the leaning began immediately and she remembers every second of the doctor visits and then the day her mother could not eat and the day her mother could not walk and the day her mother could no longer talk and they brought her to the hospice, and then she knows that she will remember these last moments with her mother every single day for the rest of her own life.
    “Katherine . . .” her mother choked into her ear, just the word “Katherine . . .” and it is enough, it will be enough to get her through the next day and the day after that and the day her mother died and the funeral and the months and days after that and then this—this remembering as Jill finds her own safe place on the porch floor.
    Always remembering.
    They talk then, Jill and Katherine, about the traveling funeral and just a bit about loss and making plans and how bizarre it will be to finally meet each other in person and how they hope they can find their way and Annie’s way and how they hope everyone else can go, and then when Jill is settled, it’s time to make the next call.
    Jill reassures Katherine that she will be fine, eventually she has to be fine, that something inside of her has slipped loose and that perhaps the traveling funeral will help her move the knots of her life a bit tighter—or not.
    “Maybe not,” Jill says, pushing the blanket around her own face. “Maybe that is not what will happen at all.”
    Katherine knows what she means. She knows that women who have climbed through a large chunk of their lives are always wise enough to realize that certainty equals uncertainty.
    “You know what they say,” she says, looking into the edges of the night that have come to rest outside her own porch.
    “What’s that, Katherine the great attorney who saved Annie Freeman all those years ago? What do they say?”
    Before she answers, Katherine bends down to pick up her bra. She throws it over her shoulder and then hangs on to the end with her left hand like a baby would hold on to a blankie that was tattered and had been dragged through grocery stores, libraries, Grandma’s house and thirteen neighborhood backyards.
    “They say funerals are for the living.”
    The calls to the three other women continue at odd intervals because of time zones and Katherine’s need to rush out at the crack of dawn for fresh coffee and then her realization that she has to quickly call in sick, which she has done only twice in the past two years, and have her clerk reschedule everything on her calendar that day. Maybe more—but first just this one day. And maybe the world will fall apart because Katherine Givins missed a day of work, was late, turned left instead of right. But Katherine manages to make the calls anyway.
    What is remarkable, beyond the fact that she does every single thing without her Bali bra, is that there is no hesitation. None. Just delicious movements of precision because there really isn’t that much to do—Annie has done almost everything as Annie has always wanted to do and she surely wants to do this more than anything she can remember or imagine. It is as if there is no choice. As if someone or something else has decided and Katherine is just filling the order like the fine waitress she was back in college when she worked until two A.M. and dreamed of calling her clerk—this moment—and saying, “I won’t be in.”
    “I won’t be in.”

5

    Jill and Annie
    Sonoma, California, 1978
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    Jill Matchney hears the new assistant professor