Turning off the burner, the kettle died down but I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be doing. Oh right, taking the sweet potato casserole out of the oven, the side dish that I had committed to bringing to family dinner tonight at my sister-in-law Felicity’s house. I doubted anyone would eat a bite, as most of my cooking turned out to be inedible experiments, but the family—it sounded so Sopranos-ish in my head—insisted we all be there to support Felicity through “this difficult time.” Difficult time. That’s how my mother-in-law Debra had worded it, as if Felicity losing a daughter was just a minor obstacle to hurdle.

I was devastated for Felicity. Angry at myself. These hot emotions coated me like melted wax, hardening the place where my heart should be. It felt dishonest being the shoulder for Felicity to cry on when I was the reason for her tears.

Opening the oven door, I stepped aside to allow light from the mismatched hood into the oven to see if the marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes had melted into goo yet. The oven that came with the house predated the time when they installed lights inside the guts. It was an O’Keefe and Merritt model, circa 1940s, old enough that I had to manually light the burner with a match when I turned on the gas. Somehow the porcelain was still in great shape, and I loved the look of it—a vintage mint green. It was the only thing I liked about my home.

Home felt too intimate a word for the house that Cody had purchased before me, furnished with cheap Walmart décor that screamed broke bachelor. From the goldenrod linoleum floor that looked perpetually dirty, to the original single-pane windows that did nothing to keep the Pennsylvania chill out, to the money-pit furnace that couldn’t keep up with the extreme lows. You’d think we could have afforded a little modernization—like trading up from wall units to central air-conditioning and replacing the leaky galvanized plumbing with PVC—but the attribute I loved most about my husband was the thing that kept us perpetually broke: his love for me above all else.

While other men slaved at their jobs, dedicating endless nights climbing whatever ladder brought them bigger pay, Cody was satisfied with just getting by. Sometimes his single-minded adoration was a huge pain in the ass. He clocked out at work at exactly five o’clock just so he could bounce through the front door and smother me with kisses. He could work an hour or two overtime every now and then to earn extra money, or take a job further away that paid more, but no, not my Cody. I was the center of his universe, and he was a pesky satellite, revolving around me. Sometimes I wished he’d get swallowed up in a black hole.