Where was Dorothy now? Last time Hazzley had seen her was when they were thirteen years old and Dorothy came to say goodbye because her family was moving to Liverpool.

THE WIND HAD INTENSIFIED, and snow was slanting to the left. Wind and snow on her birthday. Not a real winter storm—not like the ones in January that went on for days. Prior to real storms, she stocked the pantry shelves and stayed indoors. When it was necessary to go out again, she and her neighbours emerged like bears stumbling from dens. The roads were always a mess of ice and slush, and Hazzley was not fleet of foot in those conditions. Even though she wore boots with grips and rubber soles.

She also knew that this early snow wouldn’t last. Rarely was there snow on her birthday. As of today, she was officially seventy-eight. She never asked herself, as she sometimes heard others say, Where did the years go? She knew exactly where the years had gone. She could call up various periods of her life in stark detail. Whether the memories were accurate . . . well, that was another issue.

She looked sharply toward the doorway to the hall as if glimpsing the sudden movement of someone close by, but no one was there. Her past, probably. Her past was all around.

Slightly unnerved, she sat on the edge of her mattress. Lew had been dead for three years. She had mourned grievously immediately after his death. A part of her still mourned. There were unresolved issues during the last part of Lew’s life—she couldn’t deny that—but she had loved him. One of her widowed friends told her, soon after Lew died, “You know, Hazzley, it took two years for my brain to start functioning fully again after my husband died.” At the time, Hazzley didn’t know what her friend was talking about.

She had a better understanding now. The ashes, for instance. Lew had been vague in his instructions about what to do with them after his body was cremated. “Just spread them somewhere,” he had told Hazzley and Sal. He was laughing; those were the good times. “Throw them into Spinney’s Ravine, or into a fast-moving creek that leads to a river that leads to an ocean.”

The ashes, after the funeral service, had come home with Hazzley. First in a plastic bag. After that, they went into a ceramic urn she and Sal chose together. It seemed preposterous that a body could thus be reduced, and though she hadn’t exactly decided what to do with the cremains—she hated the word—the urn sat on the floor in a corner of her dining room, behind the door. On a day when she was particularly stressed, she felt she had to have some part of Lew with her when she went out to deal with a lawyer and all the demands that had to be met. She opened the urn and looked around for a small container. A near-empty plastic pill bottle was on a shelf in the kitchen, and she grabbed at that. Lew had been prescribed prednisone for something or other; she couldn’t remember what. An inflammatory flare-up of some sort, probably. Hazzley dumped the few remaining pills in the trash and filled the prednisone bottle with some of Lew’s ashes. She kept the bottle in her purse when she went out that day and forgot to remove it when she returned. Part of Lew travelled with her for weeks until she remembered to dump his ashes back into the urn. She was not about to tell Sal any of this.