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got exactly what they wanted.  It was a two bedroom house that their realtor, at the time, told them would be hard to resell, but neither of them were looking at it for the resale value.  They wanted a place on the Island that they could call their own, and, although they could have afforded to have built a house of their own design, Cat loved the flavor and character of the older houses that had been built around the turn of the century or even earlier.
    The place that they found was smaller than it might have been, considering that families during that timeframe were necessarily larger, and it had been lovingly restored by a professional, who had also been married with no children, to a wife who loved to cook and entertain.  So the master bedroom was a gorgeous suite with a bathroom and dressing room/closet area, the kitchen had the latest in appliances including dual wall ovens, stainless steel appliances and mauve granite countertops, and the living room was a warm room with gorgeous wood floors, a skylight, and, for those cold Maine winters, a Franklin stove tucked into one corner that would heat them right out of the house and into the Bangor Mall some days.
    They weren’t well off enough to be able to afford what they really would have liked, which was to have a huge chunk of land well away from everyone else, right on a nice sandy beach that faced open ocean.  There wasn’t much sandy beach to be had on the Island, indeed, in northern Maine at all.  That was the province of the southern coast of the state.  But the house wasn’t far from the mouth of a large inlet, with a big screened porch off the living room and decks off the master bedroom and kitchen that faced the river.  They breakfasted with the tides every morning through the early spring and as late into the fall as Clint would allow her to sit out there, shivering happily and eating her bagel.
    They had water access, with their small boat tied to a tidy dock for exploring at the spur of the moment, tide permitting, and Cat couldn’t count the hours she’d spent hunting for treasures along the shore – sand dollars and dimes, sea glass, and shells with which to fill up the house.  Whenever she came back with a basketful, Clint always suggested he was going to have to move out to make room for them, which only earned him a withering glance from his long suffering wife.  The fact that he was potentially right was beside the point.
    Cat drove right into the right bay of the two car garage she’d insisted they add on first thing, although had Clint bellowed loudly about it at first, like a wounded moose, clutching his dwindling wallet as if it had received a mortal blow.  But the first snow of winter that year, which, if she recalled correctly had been about eighteen inches, when they didn’t have to slog out to unbury the cars and then move them for the plow and then move them again so that they didn’t get ticketed – or worse, booted and then towed – because of the town’s plowing efforts, she never let him forget just whose genius idea it had been, despite the cost, which wasn’t anything to sniff at.
    She would never get used to just how quiet the place was when she got home.  No Sports Center blaring, no one yelling at a player to run or skate or throw or whatever faster.  No mess in the kitchen to deal with, even.  She’d gladly clean up every bit of his mess . . .
    She dropped her purse on the big oak hutch in the entryway of kitchen and consciously reeled in her thoughts. That way led nowhere.  Bargaining never worked, and only left her feeling even more morose.  The whole time he’d been dying, he’d never worried about himself – he’d always said it was the devil that needed to worry, since he was going to take over once he got down there.  Clint worried about her – that she would do exactly what she was doing, what she tried desperately, for his sake, not to do – wallow in the loss of him and crawl right into the