“Here,” she said, wanting to help him, reaching for the flowers, the wine. He mistook her meaning, he stepped forward and embraced her. She felt the wine bottle cold on her back. After a moment, she stepped away, out of his arms, and he stepped back too.

This time when Annie reached for his gifts, he ceded them to her, his face blank. Then he lifted his empty hands. “But when did this happen? I just saw him.” He looks like a confused little boy, she thought.

“I know,” she said. “Come on. Come on back and sit with me.” She started back toward the kitchen, and he followed her.

“I was having wine,” she said. “Would you like some?”

“Sure.” He sat down at the big table. “Sure. That’s fine.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have dinner for you. Are you hungry?” She set John’s bouquet and the bottle of wine down on the counter. She pulled her already opened bottle from the refrigerator. “I have some takeout stuff,” she said, gesturing at the open white cartons. “A friend brought them by.”

No, no, he wasn’t hungry, John was saying. “But what happened? When did he die?”

She put a glass down in front of him, and as she poured wine into it, she said, “Last night. Last night, in his sleep.” She noted with a kind of distant curiosity that her hand was shaking, her breath was still coming unevenly. She set the bottle down and sat kitty-corner from John, who was at the head of the table, in Graham’s chair. His face was still a mixture of perplexity and shock.

She told him a few of the details, aware of a sense of practice in this—she was getting numb to these words, these words that had been so unbearable to speak the first few times.

“It’s just unbelievable,” he said. He still hadn’t touched his glass.

Annie leaned forward and gently pushed it toward him. “I’m sorry I didn’t remember to let you know when I canceled the rest of them.”

“What?” He leaned forward, squinting at her.

“When I canceled the dinner party. I forgot you were coming. That Graham had asked you.”

He sat back and nodded. After a long moment, he said, “God, we just had lunch.”

“I know,” Annie said. After a few seconds, she thought to say, “I’m really glad you saw him.”

“Yeah.” His voice was still full of a kind of puzzlement. Then he looked sharply at her, as if really seeing her for the first time. “Did he tell you about it?”

“He did. Not much. He’s always just so happy to see you. He’s always so . . . buoyant afterward.” She shook her head. “Listen to me, talking about him in the present tense.”

“Well. Of course. It’s just impossible to think of him gone.”

She smiled at John. “As if he were more or less too alive to die.”

“I suppose,” John said.

“If only it were so,” she said. And then, because she didn’t want to weep in front of John, she said, “No. It’s just not . . . believable, is it?” They sat quietly for a moment. “I almost thought you were him. When I heard you.”

John frowned, confused.

“Just now, coming onto the front porch,” she clarified.

“Oh!” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“No, no. I don’t mean . . . It’s just that I keep expecting him, I suppose.”

John nodded slowly. “To walk in,” he said.

“To walk in and start talking.” She laughed, awkwardly.

“Yes,” he said. He sipped the wine. They sat, not saying anything for a long moment. John looked over at her. “He was happy, you said.”

“He was. He really was.”

“Hmm.” He swallowed again.

“And you know,” Annie said, “he’d been a little . . . distracted, I guess you’d say, recently. So I was pleased that he seemed . . . back to normal. We had a lovely dinner. For which I have you to thank, I suspect. Whatever it was you talked about, it did the proverbial trick.”

“Oh, it was nothing much. You know.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “That feeling of important things being said, and then you can’t really remember any of it. Just that it felt that way. Important, I mean.”

“Yes, kind of like that.” Then, after a long moment, “He hadn’t been . . . sick or anything. No warning.”

“No. I mean, he was overweight, of course. He was on statins, so . . .” She lifted her shoulders. “But nothing that would make you think . . .”

“Yeah.” They sat in silence. John seemed to be watching his own hand turn his wineglass slowly.

Because she didn’t know what else to do, to say, she asked about his family then, how they were, and heard the same report—with fewer details—that Graham had heard at lunch and passed on to her. He said Graham had told him about her show, and he wished her well with it. He was sorry, he said, that he wouldn’t have time to get over there. The silence fell again, a silence that felt awkward to Annie, but she didn’t have the energy to break it.

After a moment, John asked about a service—he said he’d like to come if there was one, and she said she didn’t know yet, it was one of the things she needed to talk about with Sarah and Lucas. “They’re coming, tomorrow.” (Frieda had called just before Edith came over, called to say Lucas would be up from New York. And Sarah had called a bit after that to tell Annie that she couldn’t get on a plane until late in the evening, that she wouldn’t get there until morning.)

“Oh,” John said. “That’s good then. So you won’t be alone.”

“No. Well, I think Lucas is coming just for the day. And he’ll . . . be mostly with Frieda, I suspect. But Sarah will stay over until Monday. With me.”

“Well, good.” He nodded, many times. Then, in a rush, “One of the things we talked about was you, Annie. Was how much he loved you.”

Annie smiled back at him.

“No, I mean it. He did. He said you were his first and last love.” John dipped his head then, and almost smiled himself. “And then he corrected himself and said maybe actually not the first, but yes, the last.”

“A stickler for accuracy. Upon occasion.”

John nodded again. He pushed his chair back. “I’m going to go now, Annie.” He stood up.

“You don’t have to. Honestly.”

“No, but you don’t need to . . . entertain me, either. I’m sure you’d planned on having this evening to yourself.”

“I had, actually. And I am tired.”

“Of course you are.”

She walked behind him to the front door. After they’d said good night, after she said she’d let him know about a service, either way, he paused for a moment. Then he said, “He really did say that about you. And I know that’s how he felt.” His eyes were steady on her. “So remember that, no matter what.”

“Of course I will. Thank you. Thank you, John.”

As she shut the door behind him and locked it, Annie was thinking, What a funny thing to say, really. “No matter what.” How could anything more happen, beyond what had? Still, he was kind to have told her. And she could imagine Graham saying it, saying it in his wonderful, rumbling voice.

She went back through the house, back to the kitchen. She sat again for a while at the table. She was calling up those seconds when she had thought the footsteps on the porch were Graham, when she thought she’d been mistaken somehow about his death. When he was alive for her for just those suspended seconds more. Then the knowledge—again!—that he wasn’t. That he was gone. That there was no way to reach across to him.

She had the thought that this would surely happen again, more than once. That she’d wake up some mornings, having forgotten he was dead, or having dreamed him alive, and have to face that loss again. She moaned, a soft sound.

She picked up her wineglass and went outside. It was fully dark. She sat in one of the old chairs on the brick patio, which was ringed by the small piles of weeds she hadn’t picked up this afternoon—little dark blobs just visible in the light coming from Karen’s house.

She turned to look over there. The lights were all still on, though that didn’t mean a thing. Sometimes they blazed all night in every room because she’d forgotten to turn them off.

Would this be her fate? Annie wondered. Alone, drinking too much, the messy backyard, the dishes left on the table or sitting in the sink, the lights left on all night?

A wave of such bottomless self-pity took her that her throat hurt, as though something sharp were stuck in it. She stood up. She went inside. She turned the lights on and started to pick up the wineglasses, the bottle, the cartons of food, the plates. The flowers John had brought for the party were still lying on the counter in their paper, tied with a pretty green satin bow. She went to the cupboard by the door to the back hall and got out a clear glass vase for the bouquet. When she’d settled the flowers in it, she set it on the big table, next to Graham’s flowers.

That was how she’d seen him, she realized. When she heard John’s footsteps, when she thought Graham was alive again, she’d seen him coming up the steps onto the porch, carrying the bouquet that he’d bought for her.

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