croissants I had bought on good china and served us quite
formally at the table. The way she took charge spooled us all
backwards in time. Joe and I shrank back to skinny kids and
she bloomed into the matriarch she had once been. A military
wife and mother has a pretty hard time, and some handle it, and
some don’t. She always had. Wherever we had lived had been
home. She had seen to that.
‘I was born three hundred metres from here,’ she said. ‘On
the Avenue Bosquet. I could see Les Invalides and the Ecole
Militaire from my window. I was ten when the Germans came to
Paris. I thought that was the end of the world. I was fourteen
when they left. I thought that was the beginning of a new one.’
Joe and I said nothing.
‘Every day since then has been a bonus,’ she said. ‘I met your
father, I had you boys, I travelled the world. I don’t think there’s
a country I haven’t been to.’
We said nothing.
‘I’m French,’ she said. ‘You’re American. There’s a world
of difference. An American gets sick, she’s outraged. How
dare that happen to her? She must have the fault corrected
immediately, at once. But French people understand that first
you live, and then you die. It’s not an outrage. It’s something
that’s been happening since the dawn of time. It has to happen,
don’t you see? If people didn’t die, the world would be an
awfully crowded place by now.’
‘It’s about when you die,’ Joe said.
My mother nodded.
‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘You die when it’s your time.’
‘That’s too passive.’
‘No, it’s realistic, Joe. It’s about picking your battles. Sure, of
course you cure the little things. If you’re in an accident,
you get yourself patched up. But some battles can’t be won.
Don’t think I didn’t consider this whole thing very carefully. I
read books. I spoke to friends. The success rates after the
symptoms have already shown themselves are very poor. Five
year survival, ten per cent, twenty per cent, who needs it? And
that’s after truly horrible treatments.’
92
It’s about when you die. We spent the morning going back and
forth on Joe’s central question. We talked it through, from one
direction, then from another. But the conclusion was always the
same. Some battles can’t be won. And it was a moot point,
ayway. It was a discussion that should have happened a year
ago. It was no longer appropriate.
Joe and I ate lunch. My mother didn’t. I waited for Joe
to ask the next obvious question. It was just hanging there.
Eventually, he got to it. Joe Reacher, thirty-two years of age, six
feet six inches tall, two hundred and twenty pounds, a West
Point graduate, some kind of a Treasury Department bigshot,
placed his palms flat on the table and looked into his mother’s
eyes.
‘Won’t you miss us, Morn?’ he asked.
‘Wrong question,’ she said. ‘I’ll be dead. I won’t be missing
anything. It’s you that will be missing me. Like you miss your
father. Like I miss him. Like I miss my father, and my mother,
and my grandparents. It’s a part of life, missing the dead.’
We said nothing.
‘You’re really asking me a different question,’ she said.
‘You’re asking, how can I abandon you? You’re asking, aren’t I
concerned with your affairs any more? Don’t I want to see what
happens with your lives? Have I lost interest in you?’
We said nothing.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘Truly, I do. I asked myself the same
questions. It’s like walking out of a movie. Being made to walk
out of a movie that you’re really enjoying. That’s what worried
me about it. I would never know how it turned out. I would
never know what happened to you boys in the end, with your
lives. I hated that part. But then I realized, obviously I’ll walk
out of the movie sooner or later. I mean, nobody lives for ever.
I’ll never know how it turns out for you. I’ll never know what
happens with your lives. Not in the end. Not even under the