her judgment had rubbed off on me.
After she died, I learned how much I had been borrowing.
Patricia died of a stroke four years before the bedroom incident.
She was fifty-nine.
She had been making coffee in the kitchen, wearing the blue robe I bought her one Christmas because she complained the house was cold in the mornings.
By the time the ambulance arrived, she was already slipping away.
The doctor told me it had been quick.
People say that like quickness makes grief tidier.
It does not.
When I came home from the hospital without her, the house looked exactly the same and felt like something had been taken out of the walls.
Her mug was still on the counter.
Her sweater was still over the back of a chair.
Her book was still on the arm of the couch, open to the page where she had left
