I followed her into the kitchen. During the earlier visit, the front rooms had been tidy and I suspected the disorder here had accrued as a function of too much stuff and no clear sense of what to do with it. My guess was that for a short time after Pete’s death, she’d worked with efficiency, thinking if she kept everything shipshape, she’d stay on top of the process. Little by little, though, she’d lost control. In her shoes, I’d have called the junk man and had him haul everything away, but something of Pete’s obsession with storage cartons must have been contagious. Truly, there was no way to know what he might have hidden away. Pack rats by nature are attached to the objects they accumulate—old newspapers, tires, vintage soda bottles, bobbleheads, canned goods, shot glasses, baseball caps. Pete had an issue with cardboard boxes, which he’d apparently found irresistible. I’m sometimes reluctant to toss one myself, especially if it’s in pristine condition. What if you have to ship something? What would you pack it in?

As soon as we settled at the kitchen table with our coffee cups, I leaned down and removed the wedding clipping from my shoulder bag and passed it across the table. “I thought you might like to have this.”

She took the picture and studied it, smiling to herself. “Nineteen forty-nine. It seems like yesterday and then I’m reminded how young we were. I swear that dress felt very stylish at the time.”

“How’d you meet him?”

“I’d just completed my AA degree at City College and I was waiting to get into nursing school. I was working at the front desk at a walk-in clinic. He came in to pick up a prescription for an antibiotic in advance of some dental work. We chatted and when I got off work, he was waiting in the parking lot. He asked if I wanted to have coffee and I said sure.”

“And that was that,” I said.

“More or less. I was smitten with him from the first. He was sweet and unassuming and almost pathologically shy because of his Marfan’s, which wasn’t that severe. He had scoliosis and those long white fingers of his. His eyesight was bad, too, but none of that bothered me.”

“What did your family think?”

“They were puzzled, but they didn’t discourage the relationship. I’m sure they didn’t think it would last. I was never interested in motherhood, and with his Marfan’s, kids were out of the question because the condition’s genetic and the risk is too high.”

“So you didn’t have to explain.”

“Right, and I didn’t have to justify the choice. Nobody understood what I saw in him, but I didn’t care about that.”

“He was a lucky man.”