A life decays in movements of shadow and drops of water. Moments like the last day he saw her, when she had gone back to the hospital, when she had another stroke and fell out of her bed. In the hospital it was as though she had drifted into space where she was lying quietly, sensing nothing around her, a collection of cells on the mattress losing their cohesion and purpose, memory leaking out her, awareness, but slowly and in measures, so that when he left he felt it would be over for her soon. Ben was waiting in the room at the boardinghouse, and they walked out for dinner in the cold December, the town empty, leaves clattering everywhere, a wind like a sharpness, light fading behind the oaks and elms. He had been living with Ronny for over a week. No one had said anything yet but there was a feeling. It was their first time being seen as a couple, even if it was not overt. Jamal and Sheila were all right, still fighting, and Minnie spent her evenings on the back stoop, ignoring the cold, chain-smoking, sitting with her forehead on her palm, sometimes sullen and unfriendly, sometimes dabbing at her eyes and hungry to talk. The hospital would kill her, she said, would kill Miss Dee, sure as anything. Today they tried to give her somebody else’s medicine. Could you believe it? And what was she, Minnie, going to do when Miss Dee got out of the hospital? She had to work, and Miss Dee would require care, somebody to look after her. You boys here, I don’t know about the house. No telling what will happen. She would light another cigarette. She liked to talk to Ben—everybody did—they sat shoulder to shoulder on the steps in the cold. She would never let me smoke in the house, Minnie said. I still can’t do it.

Minnie got a call from the hospital in the wee hours and phoned them later to give them the news. She was crying quietly, thanking them for all they had done. So it happened, Miss Dee passed away, a phrase that invokes some other direction than the ones we know, away into the after, and it was easy to tell she was gone, the whole house echoed of it.

One Sunset

LATE IN THE MORNING, A DAY after Miss Dee’s funeral, Ben came to the door—he had driven off somewhere, maybe to practice for the bowl game the team was meant to play. He stood there toeing the wood with his sneaker and shrugged his shoulders under his varsity jacket. Ronny had never seen him in the jacket before. He preferred something from army surplus most of the time. “Let’s go for a ride,” Ben said. Ronny followed to the car.

Driving with the windows open, they let the cold rake along them, closing the windows and cranking up the heat, feeling the pulse of each other, a calm exchange now, less frenetic than before—they had hardly spoken a word—the streets decorated for Christmas, stores with fake snow sprayed on the windows. The campus receded behind the trees so calm and sedate, as though it were a religious place, as though one glimpsed another kind of world when staring into the poplars and elms on the quad, the weathered copper dome of the Morehead Planetarium behind the top of Dey Hall, brick walkways tracing connections under the canopy of bare branches. Down the road to Pittsboro a few miles outside of town, a narrow, paved road led across a deep ditch and into banks of trees, old wire fence sagging under the weight of heavy vines. Branching onto a dirt road, and then another, past weathered farmhouses, rusted trailers, and old barns, into a cove, over a tiny bridge that crossed a rocky creek. What looked to be a combination of mobile home and old shed stood in a tangle of blackberry that had been tamed away from the door and the stoop that fronted it. Were they visiting someone? No, there were no vehicles, and Ben had the key to the door.