Annie started to cry.

“Oh, Annie,” Edith said. “Annie.” She leaned forward in her chair and reached her hand across the table toward Annie.

“He’s just so fucking gone.”

“I know,” Edith said. “I know.”

Annie got up to get a tissue from the box on the counter and blew her nose, wiped her eyes. When she was sitting again, she said, “I’m sorry. This is really all about me. It’s not about Graham. Or it’s only partly about Graham.” She blew her nose again. “Mostly it’s about how empty and small my life feels now.” They were quiet for a moment. Annie said, “I’m so angry at him, in a way, that he had so much energy. That he took up all that psychic space. That he took me up.”

“Well, he did. That’s who he was. That’s why we loved him.”

“But I was just . . . I didn’t ask anything of myself. I just went along.” Yes, Annie felt, this was it. She should have been more separate, more independent. Then she wouldn’t feel so hollowed-out now.

“But who wouldn’t, Annie? It was a great ride. We all went along.”

“But now that it’s over . . .”

“You don’t think you were part of it? Part of what made it all work? The ride? The ride was your life together.” Her voice was almost angry. “He didn’t do it alone. He couldn’t have done it without you.”

Annie looked at Edith. She didn’t know if what Edith had said was true or not—really, she was so lost that there was a sense in which she wasn’t sure exactly even what Edith meant—but she was grateful. She knew that. She felt it. “Thank you,” she said. ‘Thank you for saying that.”

“I mean it. Everyone knows it.”

It was a few days after Edith came over for dinner that Annie walked past the bookstore for the first time since Graham’s death, heading for a routine dentist appointment. She’d thought of canceling it, but she knew there would be a long wait to get another. Also, it seemed to her a small step back into normal life. She was feeling almost childishly proud of herself—Going to the Dentist—as she left the house and started down the long driveway.

She was deliberately walking on the other side of Mount Auburn Street from where the store sat, but even from there, it caught her eye, hanging in the plate-glass window—a huge image of Graham, the blowup of a photograph she recognized as one she’d taken, years earlier. She knew instantly what it was—the poster about the memorial gathering.

She crossed the street then, jaywalked, and stood in front of it, taking it in. It was, in a way, an odd photo for someone to have chosen to announce a party—an uncharacteristically contemplative moment for Graham. But it was arresting, and at this size, compelling. It was a shot of him in the store at night, taken from almost exactly where she was standing now, on the sidewalk. He hadn’t seen her through the darkness, the rain, as he stood staring out through the streaked glass, his reading glasses swung up on his head, his arms crossed and resting on the shelf of his belly.

Above this image the poster said simply, graham. Below it, in smaller print: “Come and Remember Him.” Below that, “September 8, 5:00 p.m.” The date she and Sarah and Lucas had finally agreed on because it was after Labor Day—everyone would be back from their summer vacations.

Suddenly Annie was aware of a movement inside the store, behind the image. It was Bill, working at the register, his back to her. And then she saw that there was a man beyond him, deeper inside the store, standing fixed in an aisle, reading a book he’d taken off the shelf. And several other customers, too, moving around.

She fled.

Or that’s what she felt she was doing. In any case, she walked away as quickly as she could, with the hope that no one had seen her, no one would come outside to call after her, to try to talk to her.

The image, the image she’d made, had startled her and then moved her, coming across it so unexpectedly, coming across Graham as he so rarely looked in life—stilled, thoughtful, unguessable. It stayed with her through the appointment at the dentist’s office, the long, strange-but-familiar hour of weird compliance, of accommodating the tools, the fingers, the antiseptic flavors in her uncomfortably open mouth, the sense of drowning in her own saliva. “It’s like being waterboarded,” she said to the technician, who didn’t respond. Was that politically incorrect? she wondered.

It struck her as surreal, this juxtaposition—even in some sense comedic. She wished she could talk to Graham about it, laugh with him, when she got home.

Instead, as soon as she got back, she went to find it, the book in which the photograph of Graham appeared. Graham’s book, Memoir with Bookshop. It was with the other outsize books—art books, books of travel photographs—on the lowest shelf of the bookcase behind the couch.

Annie sat on the couch and flipped through it slowly. The text accompanying each picture consisted of Graham’s comments on what the occasion was, sometimes on who attended, sometimes on odd or amusing things that had happened. Sometimes he just used quotes from the aftermath—the more telling thank-you notes, a couple of written apologies for some outrageous behavior.

Here was that event at the store with Cameron Marx, his third book of poetry, the one that got nominated for something—the National Book Critics Circle Award? The National Book Award? The photo was taken from behind Cameron as he read in his wildly incantatory style, and the upturned faces watching him were rapt, shocked. Graham was in the front row, as usual, and there were tears in his eyes.

How easily he cried! As easily as he laughed. As he kissed.

And yes, sprinkled among the other photographs, perhaps on every sixth or seventh page, was an image of him kissing someone. A few that Natalie had taken of him kissing Annie—once his head bent down to let his lips touch her arm as she leaned over the long table, holding out a platter of something or other. Here kissing Edith, kissing Erica. Also kissing men. Kissing Bill, who’d worked at the store from the earliest days. Kissing Cameron, and Peter. At least as many hugging people, people he swamped and surrounded.

Looking through it, Annie felt pulled back from her sense of smallness, of emptiness. Because as much as the photographs were a history of the bookstore and the parties, they were a history of their marriage. All of it, from the very start. For here was Graham in shirtsleeves at the opening party for the store, wearing the red wine stain down his front, her calling card. And here she was, sitting next to him in the front row at John Arnold’s reading, their bodies touching.

What she felt keenly as she turned the pages was how much they had made it together, this world that she and Natalie had recorded—just as Edith had said the other night. And Graham had written a version of that same thing over and over in his comments on the photos. On a photo of him talking animatedly to someone whose back was to the camera, Sarah sound asleep on his shoulder: “At least two of us up well past our bedtime. Annie, the third member of our merry crew, danced until almost dawn.”

On a photo of Annie, standing in the bright light of the kitchen, glasses and plates everywhere, Graham behind her wearing his favorite apron, loading the dishwasher. “Cleaning up together when all the fun is over. After this picture was taken, Natalie put the camera down and she and Don stayed on, helping us until everything was done. Then we all had a nightcap and bet on the Nobel Prize in literature, due to be announced soon. Annie, a little less tipsy than everyone else, called it: Nadine Gordimer. I owed her $150. Or so she told me the next day, and I was in no condition to disagree.”

When she had turned the last page and shut the book, Annie sat motionless for a long moment. Then she got up and moved to what was almost the center of the open space she and Graham had made of the first floor those years ago. She turned slowly, surveying the room—the living area, the big table, the kitchen that extended into the space under the back stairs. Unpeopled, it seemed bigger than in the world of the photographs. Bigger, and emptier. How could she ever find a way of filling it without Graham?

Come back, she thought. Or maybe she said it aloud.

15

Almost from the moment she got onto the highway, headed north toward the cottage in Vermont, Annie was thinking of the things she hadn’t done when she left the Cambridge house. No windows were locked, as far as she knew. Probably some had been left open. She hadn’t changed the telephone message to say she was gone or where she’d be. She’d left purely on impulse, shoving a few clothes into an overnight bag, grabbing some toiletries from the bathroom.