He had received his own serving of it too. On his first evening there, when he had told some old story from his days on the job, she had cut him short. It wasn’t proper conversation for the dinner table, she had said. It wasn’t proper conversation in front of the child. And the next day, when he had come downstairs for breakfast in his old gray suit, she cast him a glance suggesting that somehow his old gray suit wasn’t proper either.

Caroline had itineraries and recommendations of her own, he thought to himself a little sadly. But it wasn’t a trip to California that she was planning—it was her life.

•

AND YET, EVEN AS this thought was taking shape, he chastised himself for having it. He chastised himself as Betty would have.

After all, hadn’t Caroline every right to plan her life? To imagine it? Hadn’t he and Betty done just the same in their time? Hadn’t they spent sweet evenings in that little place on Finley Avenue picturing themselves in one of the houses on Amesbury Road? Hadn’t they spent some of the best years of their lives imagining a future for their boy, even before he could imagine a future for himself?

It was the American way.

Maybe it was the way all over the world.

In the reflection of the window, he tried to size himself up. He tried to size himself up the way that Caroline had—when he had sat down to breakfast in his old gray suit. In truth, he must have lost twenty pounds since Betty died. The weight had come right off his chest and arms. So now his old grey friend hung loosely on his frame, as if he had bought it secondhand. And what was he still wearing it for anyway? Where was he all suited up to go?

Well he knew that in this country, in this life, we fashion ourselves. We pick our spot and our companions and how we’ll earn our keep, and that’s how we go about the fashioning. Through the where of it, and the who, and the how. But if that is how we fashion ourselves, then surely it follows that with the loss of each of these elements comes the winnowing away. The burying of one’s spouse, the retirement from the job, the moving from one’s home where one has lived for twenty-two years—this is the undoing, the unmaking. It is through this process that time and intent reclaim the solitary soul for its grander purpose.

A humbling reminder, outside the window a telegraph wire supported by lean gray poles ran through the desert bearing news of weddings and wars.