I knock lightly on her door, and she opens it immediately.
“Hello, Elsie,” she says. She is wearing fitted dark jeans with a thick belt, a gray shirt under a brown cardigan. She looks younger than her sixty years, in shape, healthy, but nonetheless, in grave distress. She has been crying, that much is clear. Her hair doesn’t look brushed or blow-dried as usual. She’s not wearing makeup. She looks raw.
“Hi, Susan,” I say as I walk in.
“What can I do for you?” Her hotel room is more like a hotel apartment. She has a large balcony and a sitting room filled with cream-colored everything. The carpet looks soft under my shoes, too delicate to walk on, and yet, I’m not at home enough in her company to suggest I take them off. I get the impression she’d like me to walk on eggshells around her, apologize for my very existence, and the carpet practically forces me to do just that.
“I . . . ” I start. I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to try for small talk in a situation like this or if it’s better to just go right into it. How can you go right into it when the “it” is the remains of your husband? The remains of her son?
“I met with Mr. Pavlik this morning,” I say. It seems close enough to the point without directly hitting the mark.
“Good,” she says, leaning back against her couch. She is not sitting down. She is not inviting me to take a seat. She does not want me to be here long, and yet, I don’t know how to make this a short conversation. I decide to just come out with it.
“Ben wanted to be buried. I thought that we discussed this,” I say.
She shifts her body slightly, casually, as if this conversation is not a big deal to her, as if it doesn’t terrify her the way it terrifies me. That’s how I know she has no intention of hearing me out. She’s not worried she’s not going to get her way.
“Get to the point, Elsie,” she says. She runs her hands through her long brown hair. It has streaks of gray near the top, barely noticeable unless you’re staring at her like I am.
“Mr. Pavlik says that Ben’s body is still to be cremated.”
“It is.” She nods, not offering any other explanation. Her candid voice, free from emotion, turmoil, and pain, is starting to piss me off. Her composure feels like spit in my face.
“It’s not what he wanted, Susan. I’m telling you, that’s not what he wanted. Doesn’t that matter to you at all?” I say. I am trying to be respectful to the mother of the man that I love. “Don’t you care what Ben would have wanted?”
Susan crosses her arms in front of her and shifts her weight. “Elsie, don’t tell me about my own son, okay? I raised him. I know what he wanted.”
“You don’t, actually. You don’t know! I had this conversation with him two months ago.”
“And I’ve had conversations with him about this his entire life. I am his mother. I didn’t just happen to meet him a few months before he died. Who the hell do you think you are to tell me about my own son?”
“I am his wife, Susan. I don’t know how else to say it.”
It doesn’t sit well.
“I’ve never heard of you!” she says, as she throws her hands in the air. “Where is the marriage certificate? I don’t know you, and here you are, trying to tell me what to do with my only child’s remains? Give me a break, seriously. You are a small footnote in my son’s life. I am his mother!”
“I get that you’re his mother—”