EDITH AND DECLAN HAD LIVED a life together. She needed to remember this, and she worried she could no longer do so effectively. At times, she explored the possibility that all their possessions, all this carbon proof, might have been placed strategically throughout her living space as some elaborate ruse. Of course this was not, could not, be true, but her brain stumbled blithely over the sentiment that this would be an easier truth to accept. Where was he, then? Why hadn’t they spoken? What had he forgotten to tell her?
At the funeral, dressed in an old black suit and pearls, she had kissed everyone’s cheek, had told the story of their first storm in the house. How they had run around placing pots under every leak, and how that evening they had sat on the floor with a blanket and felt like they’d been given, instead of a nuisance, a melody. How that had been what he’d given her all their fifty-six years together, songs where they weren’t expected. She had stood at that carnation-wreathed podium and looked out at the rest of her life blankly: there was a question, surely, but couldn’t someone please repeat it?
In the first months without him, Edith had marveled at how many different types of quiet there could be. What had been so different about the levels of noise with him sitting in the chair, reading for hours in his drugstore glasses? Why did every shower, now, feel like such an exercise in fallacy, preparation for an event never coming, though this had always been a lone ritual?
She had been a stunning woman, a pronounced presence; Declan had been there to remind her of this, and now he was gone. She needed it to be communicated permanently in some way, so she could take full ownership of this new body, covered in layers of sweaters, these feet in their padded shoes.
“Aging gracefully” was a model much talked about, though Edith doubted anyone ever felt elegant or nimble amid the nearly inescapable fatigue, the persistent mutations of once-simple tasks and the shame thereafter. When the time came to collate all the rent checks and utility bills, she put the task off for hours, then days, dreading what an ordeal adding and dividing had become, the way she would sometimes face off with a column of numbers and realize they meant as much to her as someone else’s mementos. She would wipe her face and begin again, reading each figure out loud, entreating it to stay in the room.
THE KID ALWAYS SAID HELLO. Never just a cursory nod. Had insisted on learning Edward’s name when he moved in, not to mention his favorite flower and fruit. “Is there a nickname you like?” Paulie had asked. He preferred those ending in y. “Eddy?” he suggested. Edward’s head that day had been thick and jumbled: he couldn’t summon the energy to reject the suggestion, and from then on it was always “Hiya, Eddy!”