Cleo was Blythe’s second-in-command, helping manage the shop and, in her downtime, writing plays.

Frieda Mills, Blythe’s longtime friend, had volunteered to officiate the service. Now she stepped up to the podium. Her defiantly unkempt hair, threaded with gray, formed a nimbus around her small, drawn face.

The music subsided as Frieda adjusted her mic. “Good morning and welcome,” she said. “On behalf of Natalie and Andrew Harper, I want to thank you for coming.”

She gazed out at the crowd. “I’ve known Blythe since we were freshmen in college. She was the roommate I dreaded having—messy and talkative, better looking than me, never on time, constantly in motion, cluttering every space she inhabited.” She said this with a smile, and the smile trembled as she paused and took a deep breath. “In spite of all this, or maybe because of all this, I loved her like a sister. We celebrated holidays together, raised our kids together …”

Frieda’s two boys had each, on occasion, asked Natalie to dances and parties. She—and probably the boys as well—suspected they were being nudged together by their mothers.

“And then there were the books,” Frieda said. “Even in college, she had so many books that we used them for furniture—step stools, benches, nightstands, shelves for other books …”

Natalie could so easily picture that. When she was very small, her mother used to tell her that books were alive in a special way. Between the covers, characters were living their lives, enacting their dramas, falling in and out of love, finding trouble, working out their problems. Even sitting closed on a shelf, a book had a life of its own. When someone opened the book, that was when the magic happened.

“My friend Blythe often said her life was a grand adventure,” Frieda continued. “Books were her passion, so I wanted to share one of her favorites.” She put on a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses and opened a well-worn copy of Charlotte’s Web.

The passage from the classic novel was filled with lovely prose that took on new poignancy and concluded with Charlotte’s famous words: “After all, what’s a life anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die.”

Natalie had heard the reading many times, but now she clung to Charlotte’s wisdom, hoping with all her heart that her mother had left with that same calm, matter-of-fact acceptance. Haunted by images of those last moments, Natalie reflected that this did not seem possible given the way Blythe had died.