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respectable time after
her husband’s death, then called to see if we might, in our later years, try again. What if she were still angry, still feeling the injury I’d done her, and was on her way, now that she had nothing to lose—in this laughable line of conjecture, I omitted thinking about her children and grandchildren, about the value of her life to her beyond her marriage—to have, at long last, her say, to take some long-meditated form of revenge? Was she coming to ask for money? Reparations? Was she dying—this notion, I admit, came as a relief—making the rounds, saying good-bye in person to all those who’d played a part in her life?
    I put fresh linens on the guest room bed. I emptied several drawers in the chiffonier and cleared my winter coats, hats, and scarves out of the guest room closet, leaving a dozen empty hangers for Anna’s use. Without her deftness, without taking her delight—I took no delight—I did roughly what I remembered seeing Sara do in preparation for visits from her family. (Sara’s father, who would not forgive her for marrying me, was never a visitor. This was all right with me, and Sara.) I bought some cut flowers, lilies, irises, alstroemeria, arranged them clumsily in a ceramic vase, and placed them on the night table, along with a fresh box of facial tissue. I sanitized the guest bathroom, stocking it with newly laundered towels—bath sheets, hand towels, and facecloths—an unused bar of soap, and an unopened bottle of shampoo. I disposed of the few incidental and inedible items in the refrigerator and wiped down the shelves. I went to the grocery store and laid in some staples—orange juice, milk, cheese, English muffins, eggs, beer, crackers, bread. I had plenty of coffee on hand. I bought two bottles of wine, one red, one white, and a corkscrew. I mopped the kitchen floor with a lemon-scented detergent I found under the sink, and cleaned the counters with bleach. I went around the house putting away extraneous things, though, on my own, I’d acquired very little. I put off to the last the vacuuming and dusting. The lawn did not need mowing. We’d had almost no rain that summer and were under the most stringent rules for rationing water. I was not a gardener. There were no flowers to tend. Nothing remained of the elaborate perennial beds Sara had designed and planted when we moved here
some forty years ago. Over the years I’d lost a number of trees—two birches, a chestnut, a red maple, and an ancient shade oak in the front yard—to weather and insects and disease. One unlikely bit of Sara’s brief tenure survived: an ornamental white-star magnolia she planted just outside the kitchen window. Suddenly, each spring—I never notice the buds—for a day or two only, until a rain or stiff breeze despoils it, this tree, or bush—I don’t know which it is—is incandescent, profuse in delicate white blossoms.
    I found all the effort a nuisance. I was not looking forward to Anna’s visit. I was lonely, unrelievedly lonely, and I had been for thirty-five years, but I did not long for company. I never sought it. Not even in a pet. Anna had given me no sense of how long she planned to stay. I had no idea what we might have to say to one another once the main subject, whatever it was, had been discussed. The prospect of living in the same house with another person, for however short a time, was to me repellant. As was the thought of a protracted bout of reminiscing, of trolling a past—my memory of Sara would, I believed, under any pressure remain inviolate—in which I would figure as more or less a villain. I was closed to all but the narrowest range of feeling and experience, and I had not the slightest wish to open up.
    At noon the next Saturday, almost exactly one week to the hour of her initial call, Anna called me from a rest stop on the New York Thruway, west of Syracuse. She had