After Sy died, a friend of Edith’s who was also a widow gave her this advice about getting through the first year: Get up in the morning. Take a shower, get dressed, have something to eat. After that, you can spend the rest of the day in bed if you want to.
It was a trick, of course. Once you’d gotten yourself up and pulled yourself together, there wasn't much point in going back to bed. But that little lie was what sustained her. Eight magical words: You can go back to bed after breakfast.
Except that today it wasn’t working. Billy had called late last night to say that Emily and Lewis would probably be by this weekend, so she shouldn't be surprised if somebody drove up to the house. She asked him what he thought of Sy's heirs.
"I don't know," he said. "They don't look like bookstore material to me."
"What did they say about the house?" she asked.
"Not much. I told them you had been staying on as a kind of a caretaker.”
Caretaker. It was true that she didn’t have any claim to this place. Billy had never actually asked her to do any of the things a caretaker of a vacant house might do—air the place out, run the faucets and click the lights on once in a while, maybe a little dusting—and she hadn’t volunteered. She hadn’t been in Sy’s house once since the afternoon she found him dead on the couch. He looked so comfortable in death that she had considered leaving him there for the night. Nothing about his posture suggested that he had been in pain or even gasped for air. He seemed to have just slumped into it.
Later she wished she had just called his friends over to bury him in the backyard. They could have carried him from the couch to the garden and set him to sleep in the dirt. She would have set the couch on top of his grave and let the grass grow around it, giving her a place to go when she wanted to talk to him. Cremation, she realized now, had its downsides. You toss a bag of grit and dust into the wind and you’re left with no one to talk to but the wind itself.
That’s what was bothering her this morning. She was going to lose this place—her house, her garden, her livelihood—and after that, it would be as if her decades with Sy had just been erased. They had no children together, no shared possessions, nothing but each other. She could walk away from Eureka and never hear Sy’s name again.
And it was that thought that was keeping her in bed all morning.
Because she wasn’t about to start over. She couldn’t.
She rolled over and looked out the window at the corner of Sy’s house and her garden beyond. “I can’t keep doing this,” she said to Sy, “but I can’t do anything else, either. So where does that leave me?”
Stuck, that’s where. Stuck in bed. At least for today.
Gradually the sunlight swung around the room and hit the wall opposite. Usually she spent Saturday in her propagation room starting new cuttings. Today the task seemed pointless—none of the plants would make it to harvest, anyway.
There was no breeze outside. The whole world seemed to have stopped.
Sleep rolled into the room at last and pulled her back into the darkness.
*
Edith awoke a couple hours later to the sound of tires in the driveway. She sat up in bed. A car door slammed, and then she heard someone walking around the house to the back. Lewis would be knocking on her door in a few minutes, but she was in no mood to see him.
She waited. No knock.
Then, from her bedroom window, she saw a man in a suit step onto Sy’s back porch and look into a window. He headed around the corner and down the hill toward her garden.
At that moment, she remembered that she wasn’t stuck between staying here and leaving Eureka forever. There was that third option.
Jail.
That got her out of bed.
In a minute she was out of the house and running down the hill. The man in the suit should have been right in front of her, but she couldn’t see him. The gate was locked; surely he hadn’t found a way in already.
“Hello?” she called. “Lewis?”
She got to the gate and checked the lock. Nobody was in there. She continued down the hill, following the hedge along its broad southern span and then climbing back up the hill on the other side. It was much steeper on this side; she was out of breath before she made it halfway up the hill, her heart pounding dangerously in her chest.
“Lewis?” she called again.
Then she saw him. He had doubled back to her cottage after she left; now he was walking away from her front door and back to his car. Even from some distance, he looked older than Edith thought he would be, and more put-together than anyone who shared genes with Sy.
She slipped into the branches of a thorny pyracantha. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want him to see her; they were going to have to talk eventually. But she let him get back to his car and drive away before she untangled herself from the shrub.
“What a strange kid,” she said to Sy as she brushed stray leaves off her pants. “Are you sure he’s related to you?”