Every night, this hollow-stomach time comes. You’d think I’d get used to it. You’d think I’d have given up on certain things. But I see ghosts. The back of a head, coming up over a chair. His razor, left at the side of the bathroom sink. Things belonging to our children, left lying around. Those things change with the passing years: fire engines and dolls have become car keys and CD cases, gigantic sneakers. These days, the kids are only around when they’re home for a visit from college. Oh, I keep up, even as someone who’s lost a child says, “If he’d lived, he’d be twelve now.”

I used to pay attention to stories I heard about women finding someone late in life. But so few of them were never married. The odds of being fifty-one and finding someone for the first time are formidable. Even for the women who are really good looking and have social skills.

And so.

I come into the evening like I’m coming onto a stretch of bad road. Tighten my hands on the wheel. Sit up straight. Wait for it to be over. The best time is about half an hour before I’m going to go to bed. I have an astounding array of bath products. I buy books and stack them up at the bedside, and I dip into them like a box of Whitman’s every night: a poem or two, an essay, a short story, and then some of whatever novel I’m into. I don’t like mysteries. I don’t like thrillers. I don’t like historical fiction. I like stories about our time, featuring women, where a lot of the action takes place in kitchens. I like when the women talk about childhood memories and relationships and being fat and the dreams they have at night. I like sad books, too; have ever since I was little. Growing up, “The Little Match Girl” was my favorite story. Now that I think about it, the reason I loved it is obvious: Child abused in life gets the reward el grande—a date with an angel.

Not that I have been truly abused in life. Unless being ignored is abused. It does hurt, being ignored. But I don’t stay home and mope. I don’t. I go to movies, I go shopping, I take myself out to dinner. Occasionally I see plays or concerts. Once I drove in to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but I didn’t like it. The way coughing was a mortal sin. The restrained applause. The age level, frankly, of the audience—I felt like a toddler there. And anyway, if you really want to listen to music, put on a CD and lie down, a pillow held tight against your chest. Weep to the beauty, if you like; it’s a satisfying cry.