This day, the anniversary of her father’s death, was always a queer day, and even now, after forty-three years, she was upset by it. Today it fell on a Tuesday. Tuesday, the ninth of September. He had died two days before her tenth birthday. Every year, when his anniversary came around, she was reminded that in two days it would be her birthday, and then, on her birthday, she would be reminded that on her tenth birthday he had been only two days dead. Not even two days, not officially, because he had died sometime between half past six and half past seven in the evening, and she had been born sometime after three in the morning. A few minutes after three, her mother had told her. So that at the moment when she became exactly ten years old, her father, not yet buried, was not quite two days dead.

Every year, on her birthday, she would count her own increasing years, and she would also think of the lengthening span of time that separated her from her father, but most of all she would think and think of those two incomplete days, and she always woke up on the morning of her birthday with a terrible feeling of apprehension, as though she had forgotten to do something important and was going to be found out. The feeling of apprehension that she had, at the thought of the incompleteness of those two days, was terribly painful, and she could never get over the idea that something had been left undone in connection with her father’s death — that he had failed to see somebody he might very much have wanted to see once again, or that there had been a carelessness about his wake or his funeral, or a lack of respect in the handling of his coffin or at his grave. She had been too small to see that everything was done the right way. She had been bundled next door to a neighbor’s house with her little brother. From minute to minute she had not known what was happening to her father, or who was looking at him. But the neighbor’s oldest girl had known; she had been watching, and when the coffin was carried in she had called to Rose to come and look at it.

Mrs. Derdon knew perfectly well that the incompleteness of the two days’ interval between the hour of her father’s death and the hour of her own birth was accident pure and simple and only accident, but there it was, the apprehension lived, and that — the sense of accident — was what it lived on.