Annie and Karen had been talking for a while when she looked up at a motion she’d caught in the kitchen and saw Graham there. He was in shadow, but she could see his face—he was looking back at her—and, as happened every now and then between them, she felt such a welling of love for him that her body seemed to soften, somehow. She turned back to Karen in a state of intense awareness, awareness of waiting for him, of feeling everything attendant on this moment.

He came outside a few minutes later, carrying a glass of wine, wearing one of his beautiful old shirts, his amazing shoes. “My two favorite women,” he said.

He stepped toward Karen. Annie was watching the old woman as he bent over her. Her toes, with their thickened, untrimmed nails, actually turned up in pleasure when he kissed her on the top of her head.

He came over to Annie then and lightly touched his lips to hers, his soft beard brushing her chin, her cheek.

Stepping back, raising his glass, he said, “Here’s to beauty. By which I mean both of you.” He drank in a dramatic gesture, swinging his arm wide before bringing the glass to his mouth.

“And you,” Karen said, raising her glass too, and then drinking. Her lips made a light smacking noise. She lowered her glass and said, “You arrived in the nick of time—I’ve just gotten back from my trip.”

“What trip?” Annie asked.

She frowned at Annie, annoyed. “Paris!” she said. Her voice was impatient. “Paris, of course.”

Graham and Annie looked at each other. She raised her eyebrows for him. After a few seconds, Graham turned to Karen and said, “Someplace I’ve always wanted to go.”

“Well, you should!” Karen said. “It’s lovely. Fully as elegant as they say it is.”

He laughed.

After a moment, Annie said, “Karen and I have been having a drink in our unimaginative backyard.”

“What a thing to say!” Karen cried.

“Well,” Annie answered, “that’s what you said about it.”

“I never did,” Karen said.

“You hinted at it, I think. A bit broadly, I would say.”

“Well, I didn’t mean it then. Don’t be so quick to take offense.”

“I don’t think I am,” Annie said.

“How did your packing up go?” Graham asked Annie. He had sat down by now too, and had watched their exchange, amusement lighting his face.

Annie looked over at him. He seemed relaxed in himself, in a way he hadn’t in a while. A couple of weeks, maybe. “The point there is that it’s done.”

“You’re not moving!” Karen said, her face alert now, full of concern.

“No, no, no,” Annie said.

As Graham started to explain things to Karen—the photographs, the show—Annie stood and went up the stairs into the shadowy kitchen to get the lamb into its marinade and pull together a quick, simple dinner for Graham and herself. When she set her glass down on the table, she saw that next to her dramatic spring bouquet was a cluster of bedraggled off-season flowers, stuck in the small earthenware pitcher. Graham. It made her laugh, but then she took the big bouquet and set it on the kitchen island. She moved Graham’s bouquet to the corner of the table where they always sat to eat.

When he came inside, she was just assembling the salad—a Ni?oise, using the cherry tomatoes she’d bought earlier. She thanked him for the flowers.

“Just a token, I’m afraid,” he said.

He set the table while she made a dressing and then poured them each another glass of wine.

It was still light enough as they ate that they didn’t have candles on the table, though the room turned dark fairly rapidly. But there was something pleasant, Annie thought, about sitting here in the indoor twilight with the back door open; and Graham continued to seem, in some way she couldn’t have described exactly, himself again. His easy self. She assumed it had something to do with seeing John, with the pleasure that always brought him—someone he could talk to about anything.

So she asked about lunch, and Graham told her about John’s conference, about his kids. “Oh! And he said he’d be able to make it to dinner tomorrow, by the way.”

They talked about Karen, about her increasing ditziness.

Then he asked her, and she told him, about her day—about how long the packing up took, about lunch in the park in the South End. About the oddness of Danielle. “Plus—oh God!—I ran into Rosemary Gregory at Formaggio and completely blew it.”

He looked startled. “What do you mean, you blew it?”

“Oh, just that I kept stepping into one awkwardness after another. I had the flowers, you know”—she gestured at the bouquet—“and first I said they were for the party, which, of course, I hadn’t invited her to. And then, because I was trying to scramble out of that one, I said they were for you, for you for being, as I so gracefully put it to a recent divorcée, a good husband.”

After a moment, he said, “I’m sure she didn’t notice. Or mind.”

“Actually, she sort of walked off, so I think she did. Mind.”

“Well, it may have had to do with any number of other things, too. You don’t know.”

She shrugged.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.

Just before they rose from the table to turn on the lights and begin their cleanup, Annie said, “You are a good husband, you know.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “It means everything to me. For you to say that.”

She couldn’t see his face, but his voice was even deeper than usual, a soft rumble.

She reached the light switch first and flicked it on, and they stood for a moment in the sudden light, surprised by each other.

8

Something was off, Annie felt it even as she opened her eyes. The light leaking into the room at the bottom of the window shades was all wrong—too bright—and the house was utterly silent around her. What time was it? She turned to look at the clock, the glowing green digits: 6:21. She turned slightly and saw that Graham, who usually woke her well before this, was still there next to her in bed, still sound asleep.

Then, before she moved again, before she touched him, she knew. Much later, when she was talking about it with Frieda, she said she knew on account of his color—because he had no color. (He was gray, really. An odd, almost yellowish gray.) But what she felt in the instant before she really noticed that, though she never spoke of this to Frieda or to anyone else, was that his soul was gone. That was what she knew the moment she looked at him, even from her odd vantage point, with her pillow partially blocking her view. That his soul had vanished and his empty body had been left behind with her.

But not his soul, no. Annie didn’t believe in the soul. It was just that something essential to Graham, to everything Graham was, wasn’t there any longer. She could see it. She knew it.

She turned her body then, and stretched her hand out to touch him. His arm first, the arm lying nearest to her, its inner white flesh exposed, the hand turned up, palm open and relaxed.

His skin was cool under her fingertips.

She slid toward him, rising up on her elbow to look at him—at his face, at his gray face. It looked sunken under the thick beard. It seemed to her that it had lost its meaning somehow. After a few moments, she reached over and ran her fingers across his forehead, his nose. They felt cool too. Cool and waxy.

Annie rose up in the bed then, and knelt next to him. Her breath was coming fast, she could feel her heart, each thud seemed to shake her whole body. She put her hands on his arms, his chest. He’d pushed the sheet down nearly to his waist, and his right hand rested on the white cloth. She touched that hand and then that arm, cool too under the soft fur that covered it. She sat back on her heels and closed her eyes, trying to calm herself.

When she looked at him again, she saw that his eyes were slightly open. Open, but empty. After a few moments, she reached up to close his lids, aware even as she did it of the number of times she’d read of this act, or seen it, in films, on television. The ritual gesture, the acknowledgment of death.

But Annie was doing it mostly because she didn’t want to look at his eyes, so strangely blank and unfocused. The flesh of his eyelids, that usually thin and vulnerable-seeming flesh, felt oddly thick when she pushed it down over his eyes. She sat back again.

She stayed there, just looking at him for a few minutes more. For a moment it struck her as strange that his eyes stayed shut. She started to cry, but felt instantly that that wasn’t going to help her. And of course, nothing could help him. She stopped, she made herself stop.

She got up and came around the bed and sat down next to him. His body tilted slightly toward her weight on the mattress. She felt for a pulse in his cool arm. Useless, of course.

His mouth was open, and she reached under his jaw and pushed it up. When she took her hand away, it dropped open again.

The eyes stay shut, but not the mouth, she thought. It must be the heavy bone of the jaw.