For several weeks after the funeral, I still moved Elaine’s slippers before vacuuming. They were under her side of the bed, toes pointing toward the doorway. I would put them back afterward, lined up so she could step straight into them. She had been fifty-three. In July, on a Tuesday afternoon, I lost the woman I’d been married to for twenty-six years. The pancreatic cancer had allowed us six weeks between the appointment where they named it and the cemetery where I stood with dirt on my shoes.
Six weeks gave us time to be frightened together. It also gave me time to learn how little comfort I could offer when her body began failing her. There were things I meant to ask, things we kept postponing until she felt stronger, and then her breathing became the only thing I wanted to hear.
On her tablet was a folder of photographs she’d saved under the heading Someday, Italy. Little restaurants, coastal roads, rooms with windows overlooking rooftops. She had spent years collecting a trip we never took.
At home, the smallest inconveniences were the ones I wanted back. Her socks beside the bathroom hamper. Coffee strong enough that I used to joke about needing a permit for it. The way she’d answer the microwave’s little chime with, “All right, sweetheart, I’m coming.”
She laughed at that joke about the coffee every time.
I was fifty-six, living outside Appleton, Wisconsin, in the same house where we’d raised our children. I knew how to pay the bills and change the furnace filter. I had no idea how to finish an ordinary evening without telling her something.
My older sister, Patricia, was sixty-one and lived thirty-five minutes away. She’d been in the same suburb for more than twenty years and could spot a badly loaded dishwasher from another room. Suzanne, my younger sister, was fifty-five, lived nearly two hours away, and usually began a conversation by explaining how little time she had.
Claire was twenty-eight when her mother died. She and her husband, Eric, had two children and a house forty minutes from mine. Nathan, twenty-six, unmarried, lived close enough that I could reach his building in thirteen minutes.
I checked that distance myself, eventually.
All four came to the funeral. They wore dark clothes and held me close, and Patricia kept a hand on my shoulder while people passed through the reception room. Before leaving, she squeezed my fingers and said, “Don’t sit at home trying to manage this alone, Danny. Let us help.”
I carried those words home with the leftover sandwiches.
Elaine had done most of our cooking. For the first month, I stood at her counter with her handwritten recipes laid beside the cutting board, trying to reproduce meals I had spent years eating without asking how they were made. Once the onions needed watching or a sauce needed stirring, I could get through twenty minutes without checking the bedroom.
I discovered I could cook a decent meal. That surprised me almost as much as the pleasure of doing something that still had a clear beginning and end. Brown the meat, lower the heat, wait until it was tender.
Then there would be supper.
I called Patricia one afternoon while a roast simmered beneath the lid. “I’m going to have more than I can eat on Sunday. Will you come help me with it?”
She agreed. Claire and Eric brought the children, Suzanne made the long drive, and Nathan arrived late carrying a case of beer. He went back for another helping, then a third, and looked at me across the serving dish.
“How long have you been keeping this talent to yourself?”
I laughed. It sounded rusty to me, but nobody seemed to notice. One grandchild raced through the hall while the other followed, and Patricia stopped Eric in the middle of loading the dishwasher to move a bowl he had placed incorrectly.
“That isn’t going to wash there,” she told him.
Claire held out her phone so I could watch a video of the children running through a lawn sprinkler. Suzanne and Patricia got into an argument about an ancient family vacation neither remembered the same way. There were crumbs on the floor when they left, and I was grateful for every one of them.
That evening, cleaning the kitchen took longer than eating had. I leaned against the counter, tired in a way I hadn’t been since Elaine’s illness. For the first time, I could imagine a Sunday worth getting up for.
So I made another dinner.
I bought containers for leftovers and learned to judge how much rice went into Elaine’s stuffed peppers. I called on Thursdays, sometimes Fridays, leaving people time to make arrangements. I tried different meals, different dinner hours, whatever might help everyone get there.
Patricia came for several weeks, then began having other commitments. Suzanne missed one Sunday, came the next, and eventually stopped making the drive. Claire had school activities to plan around, then birthdays, then weekends when the children were worn out and staying home seemed easier.
Nathan stopped coming before the fourth month was over.
I drove past his building one afternoon, watched the dashboard clock, and drove home again. Thirteen minutes. I had been wondering whether I was asking too much, and for a while the distance seemed like something I could measure instead of a question I couldn’t answer.
One Sunday that November, I made chili. By late afternoon, the windows had gone dark and I had eaten a cracker over the sink because I was saving my appetite for dinner. Nathan didn’t answer, so I left him a message about the food and said he could come whenever he liked.
His reply arrived two hours later.
Sorry, Dad. Tonight won’t work. Let’s do it another time.
I saved him a portion. A week later, I put it in the freezer.
There were still condolence cards beside the telephone. At the grocery store, I kept buying the yogurt Elaine liked, then noticing my mistake at the checkout. Her death was recent enough that people lowered their voices when they asked how I was doing, but somehow my family had already found a way to stop asking.
During that first year, the four of them called eleven times altogether. I began recording the calls in a note on my phone, ashamed enough of doing it that I never showed anyone. Three from Patricia, two from Suzanne, four from Claire, two from Nathan.
Two of Claire’s calls were accidental. I answered to hear her talking to somebody else, and she sounded startled when she realized I was there. One of Nathan’s was about camping equipment he wanted to collect from my garage.
I listened to that question longer than it needed answering, glad to have his voice in the room.
The second year, I kept inviting them. I also drove to Claire’s house twice on Saturdays without arranging it first. I wanted to see the children, and I wanted an afternoon in which I had somewhere to go.
On one of those visits, I stayed behind the steering wheel for almost ten minutes. Her kitchen curtains were open. A small bicycle lay beside the front steps, and I could hear a television through the window when I finally got out of the car.
I was in my late fifties, trying to decide whether my own daughter would be pleased to see me.
Claire opened the door with her phone still in her hand. Her eyebrows rose, and I made myself smile before she could say anything.
“I thought I’d drop by and see everybody.”
“Oh, Dad. We’re about to go out.”
Behind her, Eric sat on the couch in lounge pants, holding the remote. He hadn’t stood up. There were no shoes waiting by the door, no coats in anybody’s hands.
“Sure,” I said. “I was passing through anyway.” Forty minutes from home, with no other reason to be on that street. She said we’d arrange something soon. I nodded as though we already had a date, stepped back, and let her close the door…
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