More deflated than they had been on arrival, Edmund and Russell didn’t have it in them to protest. They got up to leave.

12.

CASTLE TOWERS RETIREMENT HOME
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
MARCH 2, 2011, 11:50 A.M.

At her home outside Phoenix, Sally Mason sat on a bench next to the entrance making the most of the last of the morning air before the sun made sitting outside unbearable. Even though Sally had been born in the state and lived here all her life, the heat had always got to her. Sally was proud of the fact that she was a lifelong Arizonan. There’d been only about 450,000 people living in Arizona when she was born in 1933, and that was about the current population of Mesa, a place that was barely a dot on the map when she was growing up.

Today, Sally was scheduled to receive another visit from Howard Essen, the salesman she’d met a couple of times and spoken to on the phone frequently in the last few weeks. Sally appreciated the fact that Essen hadn’t been too much of a hard-seller, not as relentless certainly as the man who sold her husband the life insurance policy in the first place. She’d actually enjoyed talking to Howard about his family, a wife and three children, to whom he was clearly devoted. He’d also shown interest in her story, about Arizona when she was a girl when they still tied up horses outside stores in downtown Phoenix, about her Preston, now twenty years gone, and about their only daughter, Jean, and her son. This was one of the good days, a day she didn’t have to travel forty-five minutes for hours of tedious and uncomfortable dialysis.

Sally had decided that today she was going to tell Howard Essen she was accepting his proposal.

Howard agreed to Sally’s request to come at noon, as she wanted to keep the afternoon free. She checked her watch—it was about ten of—and Sally closed her eyes and thought about Preston as she did most days. She’d been so young when they met, barely eighteen, and he looked so dashing in his Air Force uniform when he came into her pop’s convenience store. The fifth day in a row he came in he ran out of things he needed to buy and he had no ready excuse: He was here to see Sally. Life with Preston hadn’t always been easy, but he was always a caring man. Toward the end, he set up the life insurance policy for Sally and funded an annuity to make the payments with a little left over. Preston wanted to make sure their daughter, Jean, was taken care of, and he hoped that would be one less worry for Sally.

The money going to Jean under the policy always seemed like such a huge sum to Sally. That was until Jean’s husband died suddenly, leaving her with a mountain of bills and debts she had no idea existed. The money that Sally had squirreled away after selling the house Preston bought in 1965, the best year he’d had in his plumbing business, had been diminished to help Jean pay her bills. Now Jean was having to give up most of her inheritance to help her mother. Sally protested a little, but Jean insisted, and Sally knew she was right. Preston Mason would never have hesitated—he’d have done whatever it took to help his wife live the best life she could.