Samuel died in the fall of 2017, in a hospital room that smelled of warm plastic and apples someone had brought and then forgotten. He had a heart that had been giving quiet warnings for years. Evelyn sat beside him and held his hand in the practical way she held most things, and when the nurse said it was time to let the children in, she nodded as if she had been asked about a window. Helen came from the college where she had become, by then, the director of admissions, a woman other people called when a process needed to be fair and also finished. Mark came from a condo that still had boxes in the second bedroom. Lydia came from Cincinnati on a bus because her car had chosen that week to need a pump she could not yet pay for. They stood around the bed in the order of their births, which was an accident and also not one. Samuel looked at each of them and seemed, Helen thought later, not to be memorizing but to be checking a list. He said, "The arbor needs a new wire on the north side." He said, "Don't sell the house while your mother is in it." Then he closed his eyes as if the list had been enough.
After the funeral, people brought casseroles and advice. Evelyn accepted the casseroles and ignored the advice. She went back to work for another year, then retired, not because she was frail but because the office had been bought by a company that wanted her to see patients in twelve-minute slots, and she would not. She was seventy. The house was paid for. The quiet in it was larger than she had expected. She found herself standing in the kitchen at four in the afternoon with the radio off, listening to the clock, which ran fast, and thinking that a life could be both sturdy and suddenly unoccupied.
It was at the library book sale the next spring that she met Ruth Elaine Keene. The sale was in the basement, under fluorescent lights that made every paperback look guilty. Evelyn was looking for a copy of a garden book she had owned once and lent and never seen again. Ruth was at the next table, reading the first page of a novel and frowning at it with the concentration of a person who had taught music and therefore respected time. She was a tall woman with hair the color of iron and a cardigan of her own, darker than the one Lydia would wear years later in a law office. She had been widowed at forty-one, had taught choir at the high school until her retirement, and had no children, a fact she did not offer and did not hide. They reached for the same book. It was not the garden book. It was a collection of letters by a poet neither of them had meant to buy. Their hands touched the cover at the same moment, and both of them laughed in the startled way of people who have not laughed in a public basement for some time.
"You can have it," Evelyn said.
"I was only checking whether he was as vain as I remembered," Ruth said. "He is. Take it."