“I don’t know,” Annie told him. “He was cold though. Or cool, I guess you’d say.”

He’d seemed to be writing this down, and then he went on to ask her other questions: how old Graham was. Sixty-four, she said. “No, sixty-five.” (The birthday in April, the gifts, the party with Graham happy at its center, all the friends at the long table, the row of candles down the middle, and in their gentle light, everyone’s face so young.) He asked whether Graham had had a heart condition, whether they’d gone to bed at the same time, what time that was, whether she’d heard anything in the night. Annie hadn’t remembered it then, Graham’s stirring, so she was telling the truth, more or less, when she said no to the policeman.

(The police would have to come, Graham’s doctor had said when she called him. An unexpected death at home, they had to be sure. “You understand.” Annie had said yes, though she didn’t understand at all, not until the policeman, so young, so polite, a freckled redhead, began to ask his questions.

“And you need to find his living will, too,” the doctor had said. “He had one, right?” Annie had liked this doctor the one time that she’d met him, at a reading Sherwin Nuland gave at the store.

“Yes,” she said.

“Be ready to show it to the EMTs, okay? We don’t want them doing CPR on him.”

“God, no! He’s dead!”

“Well, they’re required to try, otherwise.”

He would meet the ambulance at the ER, the doctor told her, and sign a death certificate, a necessary step. What she would need to do meantime was to choose a funeral home. Somewhere they could send Graham. His body.

The funeral home, then, was the one clear decision she’d made this morning, and that had been imposed on her. Actually, it was hardly a decision. She’d phoned the only funeral home she knew of, a brick building with an enormous sign on Mass Ave that she’d driven by every time she went to her studio. The woman who answered the phone there said they would arrange everything. Annie didn’t care, she didn’t ask what the everything was, she just wanted to get off the phone.)

Finally she made herself get up and wash out her coffee cup. She emptied the dishwasher. She started to reload it with the leftover dishes that had been sitting, rinsed, in the sink, the dishes from last night’s dinner—their plates, their silverware.

She was remembering last night’s dinner with Graham as she worked, calling up the details. Sitting at the table, they’d laughed together about Karen, her trip to Paris. Then agreed that really, it wasn’t funny. And laughed again. It had made Annie think of her mother’s long, slow decline, and they’d spoken of that briefly.

She’d talked about her day, getting the photographs over to the gallery. She told him what Danielle had said, and how surprised she’d been. She told him then what she had remembered Sarah saying all those years earlier about her—that she was unreadable too.

“Not so,” he’d said, and reached over to cover her hand with his. “You’re an open book. Open to me, anyway.” And she had felt it again, the loosening, yes, the opening, of her body.

“Nice metaphor,” she’d said. “Especially for a bookstore guy.”

He had put an apron on, as he usually did, to help her clear the table, to rinse the dishes, a sight which always amused her with its incongruity—the big man, the old-fashioned full apron, sprigged with dainty flowers, given to her years before by her kind first mother-in-law, and beginning now to fall apart.

Suddenly she was recalling a time when she and Sarah, then a little girl, were still at the table, and Graham in the same fancy apron was cleaning up. They were in the old version of the kitchen, the version whose walls they would knock out a year or so later to make the one large open room on the first floor, the room where the parties happened—the room they joked about, the joke being that if they put a bed in it, they’d never have to use any other part of the house.

On that particular evening, though, Sarah and Annie were sitting at a small square table in the corner of the old room, some of the leftover dinner dishes still around them.

She was talking with Sarah about something odd. What?

“Inappropriate touching,” that was it, following up on the ideas in a handout Sarah’s day-care center had given the parents, the handout with the rules that would keep the children safe from sexual predators. This was in the era when there was a general panic about this issue, when there were trials in which very young children were witnesses against their caregivers.

As she put the plates into the dishwasher, she was remembering that it had been dark out. So maybe it had been a wintry night. But the room was full of warm light, candlelight. She and Graham often lit candles for dinner then, in part because it harkened back sweetly to their days alone together, before Sarah; but in part too because Sarah took such pleasure in blowing them out when it was time to go up to get ready for bed.

Annie had had a cup of tea sitting on the table before her, Sarah hot chocolate. Graham had set his glass of wine on the counter while he cleaned up. They’d already played the requisite postprandial three or four rounds of I Spy.

Now Annie was asking Sarah, “What if someone wanted to touch your body, the private parts of your body? What would you tell them?”

Sitting in her booster chair, Sarah waited a moment before she answered—gravely, a bit hesitantly. “I would tell them no.” She was looking at Annie: Was this correct?

“That’s right!” Annie said. “Let’s say it together. Ready?” Annie inhaled loudly, drawing herself up, mouth open, eyebrows raised, and Sarah did too, watching her mother, trying to do exactly what she was doing. “No!” they said, almost at the same time.

Sarah had liked that. She had sat back, smiling at Annie with her mouth open, her neat, scalloped baby teeth showing. Then, watching Annie’s face for approval, she said, more loudly, “No! no! no! no!”

“NO!” Annie shouted back at her, and Sarah laughed. This was right up her alley. Sarah loved being loud. She was loud, occasionally embarrassingly so.

Now she yelled at her mother, “NO! NO! NO!” rocking her whole body with each word.

“Nosirree BOB!” Annie yelled back. She was enjoying herself; it gave her almost as much pleasure as it gave Sarah, yelling no, scaring away some imaginary bad guy.

From behind Sarah and Annie, Graham said, “No way, José!” and Sarah instantly echoed him, only much louder.

Annie had turned to look at him then, this is what she was remembering now. He was standing by the dishwasher in his apron, a dripping plate in his hand, watching them. Annie could see that he was taken with what Sarah had made of this exercise, an exercise he’d excused himself from, he’d seen it as so ridiculous. Now his eyes were steady on her, alive, amused.

Oh, Graham.

Together then, all three of them had done “Nuh-uh!” They did “No dice!” They did “No ma’am!” and “No sir!” They did “Nix!” and “Ixnay!”

Then Sarah wanted to do it all over again.

So they had, they did, Sarah and Graham and Annie, all those years ago.

Annie stood motionless at the sink, the warm water still running over her hands, lost in this memory.

After a minute, she started to work again. Rinsing Graham’s wineglass, the last one he would use, setting it into the dishwasher—this seemed ceremonial to her. Final.

Unbearable.

At about nine thirty, she called Sarah—waking her, Annie could tell by her scratchy voice. She had rehearsed the words, and she spoke them just as she’d said them to herself.

“I have terrible news, Sarah.” And without pausing, “Daddy has died, in the night.”

There was a long silence. I forgot to say my name, Annie thought. I forgot to tell her who was calling.

“No!” Sarah breathed. “Not . . . Mom!”

“In his sleep.”

“Oh, my God, Mother. I can’t believe it. I’m . . .” Her voice grew small. “Just, I can’t believe it.”

Annie explained it, waking to find him dead, how fine he was last night.

Sarah asked a few questions, and then, within a minute, said, “Well, I’m coming back there. I’ll be there probably sometime tonight. I’ll let you know.”

Annie felt ashamed of the impulse she had to say “Don’t. Please don’t.” She didn’t, of course, but she had a sense of the way it would be for the next days, her own powerlessness, her inability to control anything.