On the day Charles died, Lily pulled one of her white kitchen chairs up to the window that faced the garden. It was barely dawn. She had found Charles slumped over his desk, still dressed in a blue oxford cloth shirt, his head on the green felt blotter at such an angle that she could not question what had happened. Still, she said “Charles?” into the silent room. She stood next to him, in her nightgown, for a long time. It would be the last moment she would have with him, so she took in everything: the plaid curtains, the leather chairs, the books on the shelves behind him, the fireplace, the nape of his neck. What a relief, she thought, for him to die in the privacy of their own home, on a night they had spent together, so she did not have to stand again, cold and astonished, in the green-lit hall of a hospital. She put her hand lightly on Charles’s back. Then she walked into the kitchen and telephoned James.
“Don’t bring Nan,” she said.
James arrived as the ambulance pulled up, bounded up the steps before the men with the stretcher could pass him, cheeks red, hair disheveled.
“Are you all right?” he asked. Lily nodded. Death was not a mystery to her, this time. Soon, there would be grief. She recognized the dull, electric imminence of its hurricane off the shore. Her nights would be full of wind and darkness. But she was well rehearsed, and her boat was stronger now; her sail and rudder would hold.
And Charles’s death was not a tragedy. They’d had fifty years together, decades of parks and bicycles, soccer fields and swimming pools, school meetings and city petitions, a house cobwebbed with worry and swept clean by relief. He had seen his children grow up. He had preached and preached again, grown both more impatient with the world and more compassionate. He had stooped and shuffled; she had grown even more thin and angled. For their fiftieth anniversary, she had given him a hat with flaps to keep his ears warm, a luxury he would never allow himself. But, despite his bowed shoulders, he had remained taller than everyone, at the mercy of buffeting wind, and she had not wanted him to suffer. He had given her fifty boxes of tea. Now, they would be the tally of days she would live without him, the last one a marker at the end of the paved road from which she would have to step alone onto an untamped path.
The stretcher creaked and clicked. There was a sound like snow falling from a roof as they laid Charles’s weight on it. James came out of the study and held her hand.
“They’ll take him out now,” he said. “Do you want to see him?” Lily shook her head. She wanted to remember Charles’s face as it had been in life. She went back into the kitchen and sat down on the white chair. The sun was up, dew beading on the garden’s small batch of grass.
Charles had been dead five hours. Any minute now Nan would arrive. She would bring cinnamon rolls, and grapes, and coffee in a blue deli cup. She would bring a casserole and fruit salad, crackers and cheese, bottles of juice and milk. It would feel like too much, a bounty when Lily felt most bare, but it would be just enough to feed Bip and Will, when they arrived, and Bip’s wife, Laura, and Marcus and Annelise. Nan would pack it all in separate containers, because Will did not like different foods to touch, and she would bring fresh white bread and soft butter, because they were all Will would eat when he was sad. Who else but Nan would think of all that?
Nan would organize everything. She would choose the hymns and the flowers; she would stand next to Lily on the church steps as they greeted guests before the service. There would be hundreds; the church would be full. Will would pace the long, cracked aisle, as tall as Charles had been, and bearded, but still making figure eights with his hands and pulling at his hair. Nan would make certain that no one asked him to sit down. She would hold Lily’s hand while James gave his eulogy, and Lily would let her. Lily would be her best self for as long as it took everyone around her to let Charles go.
And then she would move to the Vineyard. After Charles’s parents had died, she and Charles had bought a house there, close to his cousins. She could have dinner with them, sometimes, and walk on the beach every day. Bip and Will lived together in Boston; she could visit them on weekends, drive Will to his job at the small company that made Shaker boxes: delicate oval catchalls for rings and extra buttons. Charles had put a pair of them on each of his desks; Lily thought them a perfect reflection of the love he had found for his son, practical and fragile, sentimental and searching, willing to be empty or filled. It made her light-headed to think about it.
The Vineyard house was too big for her; she would be lonely, but she wanted to look out at the water and know Charles had seen the same view, so she would live there, adding on to a life he had known. Nan and James would visit her for long summer stays. There would be lobsters and bonfires and wool blankets wrapped around their knees on cool nights. It would not be the same, but it would be familiar.
Nan’s loud knock on the door broke the silence. Lily took a sharp breath. Charles had not left her alone, she realized. The thought was a surprise. She and Nan and James had lost him, but not one another. He had worked on them all carefully, every day, bending and shaping, folding and binding, so that if he went first, they would not be adrift; they would be inextricably linked, these people who had known him longest and best. How she loved him, she thought—how improbably—for ensuring these friends would forever be her stitches, her scaffold, her ballast, her home.