第2章 A Widow's Almanac

The October book was *A Widow's Almanac*, and Maeve Kilbourne hated it from the first page. Maeve drove her husband to the day program on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on the other mornings she made him breakfast and set out his clothes in the order he needed to put them on: shirt, then trousers, then socks, then shoes, left before right. Howard had been an accountant for thirty-one years. He had kept books for half the county and had a memory like a filing cabinet. Now he asked her, at nine in the morning, whether they had been married long, and she said thirty-three years, and he said, well, that's a good while, as if it were a fact he had just learned about a stranger. He was not old. That was the part people struggled with. Fifty-nine, still broad in the shoulders, still able to fix the latch on the shed door if she walked him through it twice. He looked like a man who could carry a whole afternoon on his back. He could not find the bathroom in his own house. The book had arrived in her bag from Glenna's hand at the end of September, and Maeve had read it in three nights, mostly after Howard had gone to bed, sitting at the kitchen table with the light low, and by the last page she was angry in a way she could not have defended in the circle. Because the widow in the book got to grieve. That was the thing. She had this enormous soft field of a year, and she walked around it, and her neighbors brought casseroles, and her whole job was to remember a person and become someone new. It was sad, it was beautifully sad, and no one in it had to be woken at two in the morning by a man standing in the hall asking her who had locked the doors, and no one in it had to answer. "She gets to miss him," Maeve said, at the October meeting, and heard her own voice come out harder than she had intended. "I know how that sounds. I do. But she gets to miss him, and I never get to miss mine. He's right here. He's right here and I miss him every day, and there's no casserole for that." Nobody rushed to fix it. That was one of the reasons she kept coming, and had, for seven years. The circle was full of people who had learned not to rush. Vernon was the one who answered, eventually, and he answered sideways. "I read it twice," he said. "Both times I skipped the part with the food." "Why?" "Because they got it right," Vernon said, "and I couldn't stand it." --- Vernon Inman had buried his wife in the spring of the year the circle began, though he had not joined until the fall, and the reason he joined was that a woman at the post office had told him he stood at his own door too much. Ora had been the one who read out loud. Every night, from the day they married, she read out loud after supper — a chapter, sometimes two — while he did the dishes and she sat with her feet up, and it was the sound of the house at its best. He had read to her exactly once in all those years, a newspaper piece about a ship, and he had read it badly and she had loved it anyway. Now he read by himself, and he read the way some men tinker with cars, steadily and without much to say about it. He brought his books in a grocery bag because the library's canvas tote had worn a hole, and he meant to mend it and had not, and he had decided the grocery bag would do until he did. At the October meeting he read his passage from a chapter about a man sorting through his wife's sewing things, and when he finished, he folded the paper in half and said, "I kept the buttons. I don't know why. I never sewed anything in my life." "Because they were hers," Sadie said. "Because they were hers," Vernon agreed, and seemed content with that, and drank his tea. --- Cassie Tharp had come to the circle before the baby, back when she was teaching eighth-grade science and could finish a book in a week. She had come with a stack of bookmarks and a habit of taking notes in the margins, and Annette had called her, once, approvingly, a serious reader, and Cassie had carried the compliment around for days. Now she came with a car seat and a fog. Nobody called it that. Her mother called it the baby blues and her doctor called it a screening and Perry called it, gently, the way you're feeling, as if it were weather that would pass. It had been five months. It had not passed. She loved the baby. She wanted that on the record, wherever the record was kept. She loved the baby with a ferocity that made her chest feel rearranged, and also she stood in the shower some mornings and could not remember what she had liked to do. She could not remember what she had found funny. She read the same paragraph in *A Widow's Almanac* four times at the table and the words stayed flat as paper on a wall. What she remembered was this: at the October meeting, when she could not find her passage and had begun to apologize, Katia Vreeland reached across the table and put her own card in front of Cassie and said, "Read mine. I have two." It was not true, Cassie found out later. Katia had one. She had written a second one at the counter while Junie made her tea, because she had seen Cassie's face, and she did not say so, and no one ever mentioned it again. Cassie kept the card. She kept it in the pocket of the diaper bag for two years, and when she finally threw the bag away she took the card out and put it in a drawer, and it is in the drawer still. --- Romy Fraley did not come to the October meeting. She had said she would. She had said it in September, standing by the door with her coat on and her keys already out, and Maeve had said, good, I'll bring the extra cup, and Romy had smiled and said, don't bother, and had not come, and had not texted, and had not answered the text that followed. "She does this," Annette said, at the end of the meeting, stacking cups. "She's done it for years. She'll come in November and act as if a month were a weekend." Sadie, who was new, and who had spent eleven weeks learning how to talk to people in a town she had moved to for a job that did not require her to move anywhere, said, "Has anyone asked her why?" The room went quiet in a different way than before. "No," Annette said, after a moment. "I don't believe anyone has." Outside the window the streetlight came on, though it was not yet five, and the room turned the color of the tea in the cups. Glenna closed her notebook and put it away and stood, and everyone stood, the way a meeting ends when it was never once called to order and does not need to be called to a close. "November," Glenna said. "Bring a passage." They went out through the bakery, past the register, and Junie locked the door behind them, and on Court Street the four of them waited, on purpose or by accident, in a small loose group for a moment, as if something else might be said. Nothing was. It was getting dark. They each went their own way. ---