The woman laughed and pointed a finger at Vivien. “That’s a good one, right? But that’s what I need. An obituary for my husband who is still alive.”
For an unsettling moment, Vivian wondered if the woman meant to kill her husband. But she was just a slight thing, and she had the nervousness, the skittish look and darting eyes of someone preparing to face grief.
It was unusual, but not the first time someone had come to prepare the obituary for a person about to die. Usually, the illness had been so long and slow that the wife was ready to be done with the business of dying.
“Your husband is ill then?” Vivien said.
And at the very sound of those words, the woman crumpled, bending in on herself and crying hard.
“There, there,” Vivien said, putting her arms around the woman and leading her inside. Her bones felt fragile beneath Vivien’s hands.
“Let me make you some tea,” Vivien said as she urged the woman onto the loveseat.
This made the woman cry even harder.
Vivien sat beside her, trying to soothe her. “I’ll make you some tea and then we’ll have a nice talk. I’m sure I can help you.”
“Tea?” she said. “Yes, that sounds good. Thank you. Do you have Darjeeling?”
“You want Darjeeling tea?” she said. “So few people know Darjeeling.”
The woman studied Vivien’s face carefully.
“I’ve heard it’s restorative,” Vivien continued.
“How did you come to know such an exotic tea?” the woman asked. Her eyes never left Vivien’s face.
“A man I knew in San Francisco,” Vivien said. “A long time ago. He had lived in India and was something of an expert.”
“I see,” the woman said.
“As I said, it was a long time ago,” Vivien said again, suddenly uncomfortable.
They sat in silence until Vivien rose. “I’ll make us both some nice tea and we can talk,” she said.
She felt the woman’s eyes on her as she left the sitting room and went into the kitchen. There, she filled the kettle with water. She lit the burner on the stove, watching the blue flame appear. She took one of the porcelain teapots and carefully measured the loose tea into it. Her hands were shaking.
Vivien paused and leaned against the sink, feeling the cold slate against her back. It was as if this woman had come for something else, not for an obituary at all. The way she’d studied Vivien. The business with the tea. Vivien could almost hear Lotte telling her to stop being ridiculous.
The kettle whistled. Vivien filled the pot and placed it on her black lacquer tray with two teacups and a bowl of sugar. She added a few pieces of shortbread on a plate. Sometimes a grieving person craved sweets.
“The tea is ready,” Vivien said as she lifted the tray and carried it out of the kitchen, into the sitting room.
She took a step in and stopped.
The woman was gone.
The next morning, Vivien baked: bread, corn muffins, molasses cookies. As she stirred and chopped and measured, the woman kept coming into her mind. But no matter how hard she thought, Vivien could not make any sense of the mysterious visitor. She made a pot of vegetable soup, then put everything in a wicker basket to bring to Lotte. Sebastian had left her a note, offering to pick her up and take her to visit Lotte. And Vivien had accepted, hesitantly. What had happened that night Pamela died was a onetime thing, a mistake made in the throes of grief. Vivien could see that. But could he?
By the time Sebastian arrived, Vivien had talked herself out of any civility she might have offered him. If David was dead, then she was going to mourn him properly. After so many years of helping others grieve, Vivien had to figure out how to do it for herself now.
She met him at the door with the basket already in her hand, her coat on and buttoned.
“Perhaps I could have some coffee?” he asked her. “After the long drive?”
“Of course,” Vivien said reluctantly. She couldn’t refuse him coffee, not after he had come for her like this.
She held the door wider to let him in. As he walked past, she noticed how he’d shaved and put on what seemed to be his Sunday best for her. That night in the vineyard had led him on, of course it had. What kind of woman does that, then pretends it didn’t happen? But what kind of woman talked about sex, especially when it was a mistake?
Sebastian found his way into the small kitchen, and was already at work on making coffee when she met him there.
He took up so much space, Vivien thought. She realized that despite all the men who had come here for her help, none of them had ever been in the kitchen with her. It felt intimate, standing so close, the steam rising from the kettle, the smell of Sebastian’s soap in the air. She saw that he’d prepared two cups for coffee, and this gesture struck her as so kind that she touched his arm.