In the end, he’d been beckoned to by the white man instead of listening to Shrew, and one day she had a husband she was constantly nagging about cigars and not picking up after himself, and the next day and the ones after that she had nothing but his odors and his clutter, and the memory of the last words they’d exchanged on his way out the door.

How we doing for coffee cream? As he put on his silly wool deerstalker’s cap.

She’d bought it for him in London several decades back, and he’d never figured out she didn’t really mean for him to wear it.

I don’t know how we’re doing for coffee cream, since you’re the only one who drinks coffee with cream in it. That was what she’d said.

The last words of hers in his ears.

The words of a shrew who had come to live with them that same cruel month of April, when they’d outsourced her job to someone in India and the two of them were knee-to- knee inside their small place, day after day, and worried sick about money. Because he was an accountant, and he had done the math.

She’d scripted their last moment together on this earth, revised it every way imaginable, wondering if there was something she could have done or mentioned that might have altered fate. If she’d said she loved him and would he like his favorite lamb chops and a baked sweet potato for dinner, and had she bought a potted hyacinth for the coffee table, might his mind have been on one or the other or all of it instead of whatever it was on when he didn’t look both ways?

Was he irritable and distracted because of her shrewish remark about the coffee cream?

What if she’d sweetly reminded him to be careful, would that have saved him and her and them?

She fixed her attention on the flat-screen TV and imagined him smoking his cigar, watching the news with that skeptical look on his face, a face she saw every time she closed her eyes or saw something in the corner of them—a shadow or laundry piled on a chair or she didn’t have her glasses on. And she would see him before he was gone. And she would remember he was gone.

He would look at her fancy TV and say, Dearest, why the TV? Who needs a TV like that? It probably wasn’t even made in America. We can’t afford a TV like that.

He would not approve. Oh, Lord, not of anything she’d done and gotten since he’d been gone.

The recliner was empty, and the worn spot made by him caused her to feel such despair as more memories rushed back at her:

Reporting him missing.