She remembered her grandmother suddenly, alternately furious and resigned when her children put her into a “continuing care facility.” In her tiny room, too full of every possession she cherished—the spoon set from Grandma Ida, the tea service from Auntie—she had smiled bitterly at Annie and said, “Just wait. It will come to you too.”

“Actually,” Annie said quietly now, “he didn’t want a service, but he said we could have a party if I wanted to. If I had the energy.” Annie had read this earlier—yesterday—when she’d found Graham’s living will, just before she called the hospital. Maybe a party, he’d written, if she was up to it. And then he’d written, “But absolutely nothing more!”

There was a silence. Annie could feel a shift in the air among them. They’d won. After a long moment, Lucas said, “We could do it later. When you’ll have more energy. The party. Sarah and I would do all the work.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “We could ask Erica”—the events person at the store—“to put up a poster now, or in the next couple of days, for a, you know, a celebration of his life. Say, a couple of weeks from now.”

Annie groaned.

“Okay, a month, then,” Lucas said. “A month and a half.”

She didn’t answer.

“Whenever you want, Mom,” Sarah said. “It’s just I think people are going to start asking you about it all the time, a service, and this would be a simple, quick answer.”

Annie didn’t say anything.

“Mother?”

“All right,” Annie said. “Let’s look at the calendar.”

A little after nine on Monday, the day Sarah was to go back to the West Coast, Annie answered the door and the nice young man from the funeral home was standing there, blurry through the old screen with its rusted mesh. Behind him, the sunshine through the leaves of the linden tree in the Caldwells’ side yard made a greenish light. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said.

For a moment Annie couldn’t imagine why he had come, but then she saw the wooden box, the one she’d chosen for no good reason to hold Graham’s ashes. Or really, she thought now, she’d chosen it because it had felt wrong to her at the time to ask them to put the ashes into a cardboard box, which seemed to be the only alternative. It was ridiculous—Annie knew she’d be scattering the ashes, not keeping them. But the thing was, she didn’t want to seem cheap—that was it, wasn’t it?—so she’d succumbed to it, this large, overweening box.

“No,” she said now. “There’s nothing to interrupt.” She thought that sounded self-pitying, so she opened the screen door. “I see you’ve brought me Graham’s ashes.”

“Yes.” He held out the wooden box. “Again, our condolences.”

“Yes. Thank you.” Annie reached out to take the box. She was surprised at how heavy it was.

“We were glad to help.”

Now he held up also a cloth satchel, the kind the bookstore would sell you to tote your books home in. This one had no logo.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“His clothing,” he said. “What he was wearing.”

She remembered it instantly, the old T-shirt. She remembered, too, lifting the sheet to see Graham’s nakedness below it, her moment of looking at him, his big body, his penis, his long thighs—eons ago, it seemed. Three days. No, four now.

He reached into the bag and lifted a small white box from within it to show her. “And his ring. His wedding ring, I imagine.” He dropped it back into the bag.

Annie had thought of none of this, that these things would be coming back to her. It made her feel negligent. She’d let Graham go off to be declared dead, to be burned up, wearing nothing but an old T-shirt, his wedding ring still on his finger. Who would do such a thing?

“Thank you. Thank you for everything,” she said, taking the bag from him, holding it and the big wooden box awkwardly as she stepped back. The screen door shut between them, a gentle smack.

“We were honored we could help,” he said again, already turning away.

Annie watched him go down the walk. He was dressed as if perhaps he was going to play golf in a little while, green slacks and those brown-and-white shoes—she couldn’t think of the name for them at the moment

She could hear Sarah back in the kitchen. She was putting something together for breakfast.

For a moment she stood in the hall, unsure of what to do next, where to put the bag and this absurd wooden box. It seemed to her that there must be some appropriate place for it that she was just not capable of thinking of at that moment.

In the kitchen, Sarah turned the blender on.

Annie didn’t want to discuss any of this with her. Certainly not the ashes —it was too soon!—but also not her stupidity in capitulating to this ridiculous, outsize wooden object.

She moved to the narrow stairs and started up. She would put the box in the bedroom. If Sarah asked about the ashes, she’d make something up about when they were supposed to arrive, or when she was going to pick them up. They’d agreed, anyhow, she and Lucas and Sarah, to scatter them together up at the cottage before the memorial party, which they’d finally decided to have in the fall, when people would be back from their vacations, their summer homes.

She thought of “the cottage”: the little summer house she and Graham had bought as a gift to each other the year after Sarah graduated from college. She pictured it, the world that she and Graham had made there. The world away from the world. She’d like to be there now. Away. She would go, she decided. Soon. She would go alone.

In the bedroom, she slid the wooden box to the back of her side of the closet, amid the jumble of her own shoes. Graham’s side was nearly empty—one of the chores Sarah had undertaken yesterday was clearing out his clothing. Annie had been surprised, actually, when she found Sarah laying those things out on the bed, bagging them. Then, after she’d helped Sarah set them out on the front porch for a pickup on Monday, suddenly grief-stricken. She wanted them back, the things he’d worn. The night after he’d died, after she’d gone to bed and woken from a light sleep, she’d gotten up and gone to stand in the dark closet among them, the beautiful linen and wool jackets, the slacks, the soft, worn shirts.

Now she took the ring and the T-shirt out of the bag and started to put them in the top drawer in Graham’s side of the dresser. But then she stopped and lifted the shirt to her face, inhaled the scent of Graham it still carried, even as she was aware of this as cliché too, of how often she’d read it, seen it. But how impossible it was not to do these things! These things that so many others had done before you. These were the things you wanted to do.

She went to the bathroom to be sure she looked all right—whatever that meant; normal, she supposed—before going back downstairs to sit with Sarah, to eat whatever she’d prepared or assembled out of the many gifts of food that friends had brought over.

Annie had checked herself over and over in one mirror or another in these last few days, so keenly did she feel that she must have been transformed. That her emptiness, her shock, must be visible somehow, must have stamped her. And always, always when she looked, here she was, the unchanged face, the graying dark hair framing it, the wide-spaced, slightly startled-looking dark eyes, the thinning lips with the little net of creases above and below. Normal.

She had been pretty when she was younger, pretty in what might have been called a gamine way. Perhaps “elfin,” if you were being less kind. She had actually dressed as an elf once, for a costume party early on in her marriage with Graham. He was Santa Claus that night, there was that radical a difference in size between them.

Her old friend from photography school, Natalie Schumer, had said to Annie once that of course they all speculated on the sex between Graham and her, on how it could possibly work, mechanically. And though Annie had been startled by the idea of this being discussed openly among her friends, she’d tried to keep her face pleasantly expressionless as she said, “Oh! Very well, thanks.”

After a second, Natalie had grinned and said, “You’re not going to give me anything?”

She smiled now at the memory, at the thought of Natalie, big and solid and almost manly, even in her tentlike dress—“Our own Gertrude Stein,” Graham had called her—and watched her face in the mirror grow younger by ten years. Five, anyway.

She tried it again downstairs, smiling at Sarah as she came into the kitchen, and was touched to see relief and pleasure lift her daughter’s face.

“Sit,” Sarah said, smiling back. “I’ve made us a lovely brunch out of this and that.” And Annie thought again of how changed she was. Of how the Sarah who’d arrived back home this time was not the Sarah she’d expected.

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