The rain kept slashing at the road, and Anne found herself once again siphoned along Lemmon Avenue as it ran east of Love Field. A puke-orange Southwest plane was taxiing in. Goddamn airlines. Over the course of the past week, Anne had put herself through all the stations of the cross that accompanied the news of what they were calling Pat’s early retirement. He’d come home in the middle of the night, too drunk to explain. When he sobered up the next morning, she got some version of the story and felt the hollowing grief of someone whose fears had finally been realized.

After Pat told her, Anne didn’t go volcanic. Instead she folded inward and started counting and saving money. She clipped more coupons. She lowered the thermostat and disputed the water bill. She moved the CDs to Forestwood National for a quarter-point-higher return. She started gluing Green Stamps in the S & H book and buying month-old Wonder bread at the Hostess Thrift Store off Webb Chapel. No more Smirnoff; they were relegated to Wolfschmidt in the plastic bottle, which the Goody Goody in Addison had for a dollar cheaper. She prayed rosary decades that nothing major would break. Like the wipers on the Zephyr, for example; she would endure a world of half-working things. They had until February before the severance ran out, and plenty of savings behind that, but she pauperized them within a week. She would send Dan down the alley to collect bottles and cans from neighbors’ trash. She canceled the Morning News subscription but needed the coupons, so she would go on morning walks to steal papers from the driveways of folks on vacation. All of this frugality didn’t make Anne, or anyone, feel better. It was just her response, her way of drawing a circle around what she could control. The real problems lay in shallow graves and on unseen trip wires, and so she would be driving on a rainy day, see the burnt-orange tailfin of the Southwest 737, and the tears would come.

The rain had sputtered to a stop as Anne pulled the car onto Crown Shore. It was just past noon, and the sun was creeping out of murky storm clouds. Pat’s Cougar was parked at the top of the driveway, the garage door open. This was one of Anne’s assignments for Pat—clear all the crap out of the garage, all the unopened boxes from the Bronx, and figure out what was worth selling. That was right, a garage sale in December. Pat promised to talk to the Peñas, the Phillipses, and the Callahans and try to get their part of the block to go in with them and place an ad in the Greensheet.

Anne helloed through the door. The house replied with silence. She dropped her purse on the kitchen table and made her way to the TV room in the back.

There was Pat laid out on the couch.