For months Evelyn held on to that absence like a grievance that could keep grief from swallowing her whole. She told herself that Clare had chosen her own life over her family, although she knew the truth was more complicated. At night she would sit in Walt's worn brown recliner and remember the way Clare used to run toward him with school papers in her hands. The memory never made her angrier. It simply made the house feel larger and emptier.
The garden began to lose its shape. Without Walt to weed and prune and mend the irrigation hose, the tomatoes collapsed against their stakes and the herbs sprawled through the paths. Evelyn attempted to work outside on good mornings, but arthritis made kneeling painful and her heart condition tired her more quickly than it once had. Sometimes she stood with the watering can in her hand, remembering a task he had explained, and suddenly could not bear to perform it without him.
There were reminders of him everywhere indoors as well. His blue coffee mug, chipped at the handle, remained on its shelf. His work boots stood neatly beside the back door, though nobody had worn them in months. The shadow box containing the funeral flag sat beside his wedding photograph and a framed picture of Clare as a child, her face bright with the certainty that home would always be exactly as she remembered it.
Evelyn still wore her wedding ring. Fifty-three years had thinned the gold until the inside of the band was almost smooth, and she knew that a jeweler would have recommended reinforcing it. She could not bear the thought of leaving it at a shop for even a day. She turned it whenever a difficult decision appeared, feeling the small resistance of the ring against her knuckle and remembering Walt's hands placing it there.
She had never imagined that the greatest danger she would face after his death would arrive through the front door with a pleasant smile and a folder of professional-looking paperwork. If someone had warned her, she might have said that at seventy-eight she knew the difference between kindness and deception. She had been a wife, a mother, a worker, and a neighbor; she had survived losses that seemed impossible to survive. What she had not yet learned was how easily grief could make a person desperate to trust the first stranger who offered to carry the weight.
The first sign that Evelyn needed more help than she wanted to admit came on a Monday when she found a saucepan burned black on the stove. She had put water on to boil, walked into the bedroom to find a clean blouse, and forgotten that she had been cooking. The smoke alarm startled her so badly that her heart raced for several minutes after she opened the windows. She sat at the kitchen table with both hands around a glass of water and wondered what Walt would have said if he had been there.