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hotel shampoo. Carmen took one last look at the bed, a flat plane without even the faint impression of Jobe’s body. It was, she thought, as if he’d never been.
    Something about this made her angry as she climbed the stairs to the attic. Her husband had left with so little fanfare, just as he’d lived, quietly writing his papers and talking to students, trying to solve the Riemann hypothesis though he and everyone else knew it was impossible to do in one lifetime—especially Jobe’s, short as it was.
    Carmen had to duck when she emerged from the narrow stairwell, the way Jobe had once needed to downstairs. But after she had crawled up the last few steps and walked to the center of the peaked room, she could stand and reach her hands all the way up without touching the ceiling. In some ways, the attic was typical, with dancing dust motes and small windows and a faint, ghostly, gingerbread smell.
    Carmen knew from the previous owner’s daughter that the family that had lived there for half a century before them used to keep their Christmas cookies on the attic stairs.
It was dry and cool there
, the woman had explained. She was a portly little peanut of a person with snow-white hair and soft, latticed cheeks. She told Carmen that none of the seven children in their family would touch the cookie tins once they were stacked on the wooden steps.
I don’t know why
, she had said and laughed.
It wasn’t that we couldn’t, of course. But there was something special about the attic. It somehow wasn’t a real part of the house
.
    Carmen knew what she meant. Coming up here felt like ascending through a tunnel and entering a different world. This was an attic with eaves, which went completely against type. The way it was furnished added to this feeling. It was the furniture from their first five years of marriage, which had been Carmen’s—and Jobe’s, because he tended back then to go along with what she wanted—modernphase. There were teak tables, blond and sleek and low to the ground; geometrically patterned rugs; and a sectional couch made up of twelve different pieces that could be combined in a nearly infinite number of ways, like children’s blocks. They were the exact opposite of the hinged trunks and rocking chairs one might expect to find in an attic, and Carmen had arranged the set as if for company. But she was the only person who ever went up there—mostly to be alone during the period before Jobe’s diagnosis when he seemed always to be in her way, expecting some pseudo-wifely act.
    She sat and stared at the phone in her hand. But at the edge of her mind, crouching, was the memory of Jobe lying against her, his hand in her hair, chin grazing the top of her head. It had been years since she’d thought about the way he took care of her that night. The moments she tended to recall from their marriage were the ones in which she’d felt nothing except that void between two people that was worse than being alone. Reading in a chair and feeling the air change, his presence intruding on its molecules, when he sat on a has-sock that he’d pulled to within a few inches of her feet; trying to come up with a trip for their twentieth anniversary, which she was afraid would be a week of painful small talk and the question every night about whether or not they would make love.
    They didn’t throughout the whole trip, which turned out to be to Bermuda. And Carmen was relieved but also hurt. She’d spent her days in a low-cut, black bathing suit, with a gauzy skirt pulled over it and a pair of sandals for when they walked into town. Yet her husband no longer even tried to put his hands on her. He got into bed each night like a brother, sometimes patting her hip before turning to face the wall. Sex between them had never been quite natural, but now it seemed like something hopelessly complicated that required physical contortions they’d both forgotten—a gymnastics move, which had been difficult yet possible when