The television was off. The house was quiet. The December light had gone entirely and the window beside me showed only the dark yard and the shape of the old oak that Richard had once
proposed cutting down and that I had defended until he relented, and which I had been grateful for every autumn since.
I thought about Richard saying goodnight to the tree, a joke he made every fall when the leaves dropped, the same joke for twenty-six years, never less funny to him or to me for its repetition.
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<p>The kind of joke that only works because you share enough history for the return of it to be its own pleasure.</p>
<p>I thought about Michael’s laugh in the hallway.</p>
<p>I thought about Jennifer at the sink.</p>
<p>I thought about Lisa saying I sound like Dad.</p>
<p>I picked up my phone and opened it to the contacts. Jennifer, Michael, Lisa. Below their names, the dates of the last calls, which my phone tracked without sentiment or judgment.</p>
<p>I did not call anyone.</p>
<p>But I looked at the dates for a long moment before I put the phone down.</p>
<p>In the kitchen, the pasta pot needed washing. The coffee cups were already done. The table held the slight disorder of a meal shared by seven adults and five children, crumbs and a small smear</p>
<p>of tomato and a crayon that the youngest had carried to the table and left behind.</p>
<p>I brought the crayon to the basket in the living room where the grandchildren’s things lived between visits.</p>
<p>I washed the pasta pot.</p>
<p>I wiped the table.</p>
<p>I turned off the kitchen light and walked down the hall and stopped at the empty space where the photograph had hung. The nail was still there, a small brass nail in the cream-colored wall.</p>
<p>The photograph was in a box in the bedroom closet. The beach photograph, the four of us, Jennifer with her chin lifted in the wind, Michael squinting at something off to the left, Lisa holding</p>
<p>her hat, me in the middle with my hand raised against the sun, all of us slightly blurred because Richard had set the camera timer and then run to get into the frame and he was always running in the beach photographs, always slightly out of breath when the shutter closed.</p>
<p>I stood at the nail for a moment.</p>
<p>Then I went to the bedroom closet and opened the box.</p>
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