IT’S SEVEN SIXTEEN ON Wednesday night and Ellen still isn’t home from her book club. George hasn’t had his dinner, which Ellen always cooks from scratch and always has ready on the table with his half-glass of beer at five forty-five.

After she serves something warm and British (George doesn’t believe in any seasoning other than salt and lots of it, always sprinkling some liberally before checking the dish needs it), Ellen does the washing-up, dries the dishes, then lays the tea-towel over the tea-towel holder he made for her thirty years before. She snaps the cloth out before she hangs it, three times quickly, then once again. It will dry in the slow breeze that comes from the back door, which they always leave ajar for this reason. It will be ready to polish the plates after the boiled egg, and marmalade on toast they will have for breakfast the next morning at seven thirty. It will be washed that afternoon and hung on the line, which George put up five years earlier, after the first one collapsed in a storm. (George was cross about this. He’d planned for that washing line to see him out.) The tea-towel will hang alongside the sheets, towels and George’s white underpants, which Ellen washes on Thursdays.

On Wednesdays, Ellen leaves for her six o’clock book club at five fifty-four because it’s at Sue’s house, only three doors down. Sometimes they hold it at Barbara’s house, ten doors down, and then Ellen leaves at five fifty. They never hold it at George and Ellen’s house because George hates Ellen’s loud, opinionated friends, and he hates books even more. He also hates the nibbles Ellen makes that he is not allowed to eat because of his cholesterol. George doesn’t believe in cholesterol, global warming or baseball caps.

Ellen’s book club finishes at seven. George sits in his chair and his stomach hurts and now it’s seven eighteen and Ellen still isn’t home. Sometimes George stands at the bay window and watches her walk back towards him, sees her stop to say hello to next-door’s cat, which George wants to shoot because it shits on his shingle.

Today, he doesn’t go to the bay window to watch Ellen walk back to him, because Ellen won’t be walking back. Ellen died eight days ago. Her book-club book is on the walnut side table next to the beige sofa. George made her that table, dovetailed joints she’d cooed over. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. George hates this book most of all, and the fact that Ellen was often reading it instead of cooking his dinner, and now she’s dead and there’s no one to look after him.