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Scotch be viewed in the after-dark eyes of men as quite the lad. Sufficiently capacious for life with three women; sufficiently brave. “And you know,” he told Nora, “you’re exaggerating. Even if you weren’t, being friendly reduces the chances of real harm being done.”
    Depends what you consider real harm.
    And where was his loyalty?
    Where is his loyalty now, leaving like this?
    Now it is into that town that Philip’s lucky and unlucky body has descended: in that town’s ambulance, followed by a cruiser and Ted Marlowe’s Jetta, to its hospital, and into the hands of its pathologist, to the ministrations of its undertaker and funeral home, to the rejoicings of its florist and to the depradations of its curious. Nora takes a deep breath, and another, and discovers these deep breaths are suppressed, withheld sobs—how long since she turned her head on the pillow and reached out and began learning that everything, everything will be different?
    Not long. What does she mourn? What will she come to mourn? Because these are sometimes different things.
    “So,” Sophie says, her voice tight, but practical as ever, “what do you think, should we plan a service for here?”
    “I don’t know.” Nora shakes her head sharply.
    “What? You don’t want to?”
    “It’s not that. It’s just, I can’t believe this is possible. That it’s true.”
    “Oh!” Beth cries, so that Nora and Sophie turn. What exactly caused that sharp yelp of, what, grief?
    Nora ought to be grateful for Sophie’s offer, she
is
grateful, but she is also Philip’s wife. Was. Was wife, is widow, new definitions and tenses that will become clear and automatic in time but certainly not yet, not today. It should, anyway, be Nora’s role to act on funereal matters.
    She and Philip fell so easily into letting Sophie take over tedious or bothersome chores.
    Also having first Sophie, then Beth, move here meant Nora and Philip had less time to themselves than they used to. Then too, the time they did have, they may not have used entirely wisely. Or so it seems to Nora right now. It couldn’t have felt that way at the time;
the time
being anything up to last night.
    As with, probably, having children: the more people involved, the more distracted, diffuse, a household becomes.
    Not one of the three women at this kitchen table is a mother. Perhaps that’s why they don’t automatically fall into embraces and other solacing gestures they might have known how to make if they had children. Or perhaps that’s not why. For the most part everyone has learned, with greater and lesser degrees of effort, and with greater and lesser degrees of sincerity, to suit each other’s purposes, fit into each other’s hollower spaces, but they have not been quite this harshly tested before.
    Also that was with Philip alive, when they were four. Death changes everything. Suddenly Nora is a forty-three-year-old widow. Suddenly Sophie, ten years younger, only has one employer. Suddenly Beth, four years younger still, andaalready surplus to requirements, is further exposed within this smaller, disrupted group.
    Each is bound, too, to have different perspectives on Philip himself. Even physically Sophie met him nearly eye to eye, while Beth was chin-height, while Nora’s head dipped nicely into his chest, comforting and obscuring. Also, Sophie and Beth have only known his middle age, a more limited point of view than Nora’s. Sophie thinks of him with B-words like
bulky, brawny, boisterous;
plus several non-B words. Beth, coming from a world of thin female beauty, found him, more negatively, too loud and too looming. Neither of them knew the man who did odd jobs around town when he and Nora first moved here because they needed the money and he was not too proud to build a deck here, paint a porch there. “It’s all work,” he said, “it’s all cash.” They did not know the man who made the bold decision to earn his own living, minimal in the early days, then