“She wouldn’t be there, Ed. Any more than I find her in the cemetery. She’s here. And not. We lost her. We had her for a little while and we lost her. End of story.” Alice pulls herself away from Ed and they both sit on the edge of the bed. “Sometimes I think that I need to gut her room and turn it into a den or an office or something useful. Put all of it away. And then I realize that once I do, I will have accepted her death.”

“I think that maybe we have accepted her death, but not the reason for it. It wasn’t like a car accident, where you’d put a cross and a teddy bear at the scene; it was an illness. It was something so out of our experience, we will never be able to understand how she felt.”

They are silent again. But this time, the silence isn’t a wall, but a cocoon.

“What do we do, Ed?”

Buddy barks suddenly, an impatient complaint of abandonment.

Ed kisses Alice. “Let’s go look at cars.”

“Maybe we should turn in the van. Get a Prius. Something economical. I don’t need all that space.”

“The Cutlass is older. Maybe we should see what they’d give us for that.”

Ed is dressed first and goes out to the garage to soothe Buddy. Alice is back in front of the mirror, repairing her hair, putting on a little lipstick. She sees herself smiling, which is a surprise. Maybe it’s the diffused light through the ivory-colored shades in this bedroom, or maybe it’s something else, but the reflection coming back at her isn’t as pinched as it’s been. She’s got good color in her cheeks, probably from all the walks she’s been taking with Buddy. If she turns her head in a certain way, she even looks a little pretty, a little girlish. Alice looks at herself in the mirror and sees a hint of roses in her cheeks, something besides sadness in her eyes. What they’ve said was hard but, in a strange way, comforting. As if they’ve faced a common enemy and not fled.

*   *   *

At first, it was nice to have the front seat all to himself. Buddy doesn’t know how long Ed will be. But after a couple of minutes, he settles down, nose under tail, eyes closed, but ears alert for Ed’s return. Eventually, he dozes. Then he wakes and is puzzled. He hasn’t been left alone in a car for this long, and never without being someplace other than where they started. He barks. This is a little naughty for a dog who can down-stay for hours, but there was no command. He barks again: Hey, where are you?