“You did that?” said Hazzley. “I did exactly the same—though I didn’t plan to tell anyone. After Lew died, when everyone was gone and I was alone, I wandered around the house for a while and kept thinking of what people had said at the funeral: that he’d had a good life, a useful life. He’d been dead only a few days and already he was being summed up. And what if I didn’t agree? There are so many facets to a person’s life, so many incidents and turns and adventures and insights and loves and joys and likes and dislikes and regrets and embarrassments—well, now I’m out of breath. But how can we choose ‘good’ or ‘useful’ as if together those two adjectives make up a life? Finally, trying to put this all together, I wrapped a blanket around myself and curled up on the floor in the family room and cried my eyes out.”

Chiyo and Hazzley looked to the others. Gwen was nodding. She had something else to say. “I cried so hard when my boys—the twins—left after the funeral,” she said, “I stayed on the floor the entire afternoon.” She did not say that there had been days when the only feeling she had was the recognition that her life energy had gone out of her. She had been deserted by her emotional self.

This was Gwen’s first mention of children, let alone twins, but no one had a chance to comment because Tom jumped in. “The floor was hard,” he said. “There were moments when I felt like doing that, but the floor was merciless for these brittle bones.” He had stood at the window and cried for Ida and for himself, but he didn’t mention that. Nor did he mention that when he cried, tears flowed only from his left eye. One more condition to report to his ophthalmologist, along with the occasional difficulties he was having now with depth perception.

“You know something?” said Hazzley. “It makes me feel better to hear that others have done the same. But what on earth is comforting about lying on the floor? The act, I suppose. The prostration of self. The giving over. The discomfort. The abandonment to grief. Comforting in some way. But done privately in our culture. Not actually visible to others. Not like rolling down a hill. Though I suppose one could roll down a hill when no one else is around.”

Allam slid back in his chair, watching, listening.

“There are so many things that aren’t apparent,” said Addie. “Things we keep private. Not necessarily about grief, and I don’t mean to change the topic—that is, after all, what has brought us together—but . . .”

“Things that aren’t apparent.” This was Chiyo.

“More or less invisible. We could take this in any direction.”

Gwen was thinking about how she was able to become invisible while hiding in plain sight. She still hid occasionally, even though she lived alone. She didn’t actually hide, but she felt that she was hiding. Old habits. After Brigg died, after the funeral, after her sons left to go back to their families in Texas, after she’d curled up on the floor and cried herself out, she picked herself up and opened a bottle of red wine and sat on the stoop at the back of the house, where she was sheltered from prying eyes. She drank one glass of wine. Another. She smoked two cigarettes she’d blatantly lifted from a package one of her sons had purchased while staying with her. She tried to inhale. Blew smoke gracelessly into the air. No grace, no elegance, no charm. Finished the first cigarette, stubbed out the butt, lit the second. Drank a third glass of wine and felt a sense of accomplishment. An act of defiance against the dead. Dead Brigg. There was no summing him up. No sirree.