Other than Cash and Baker, no one here in Iowa City knows that Russ is dead; Irene hasn’t told anyone, which feels like a huge deception, as though she stuffed Russ’s corpse into one of the house’s nineteen closets and now it’s starting to stink. Irene quiets her conscience by telling herself it’s her own private business. Besides, no one has asked! This isn’t strictly true—Dot, the nurse at the Brown Deer Retirement Community, asked where Russ was, and, in a moment of sheer panic, Irene lied and told Dot he was on a business trip in the Caribbean.

And he couldn’t get away? Dot asked. Even for this? Dot was fond of Russ; she cooed over him at his every visit as though he had forded rivers and climbed mountains to get there, although she took Irene’s daily presence at Brown Deer for granted. Irene perversely enjoyed watching the shadow of disillusionment cross Dot’s face when she learned that Russ had put work before his own dying mother.

Russ’s footprint in Iowa City all but disappeared after he took the job with Ascension thirteen years ago. Russ used to know everybody in town. He worked for the Corn Refiners Association and was a social creature by nature. He would drop off Baker and Cash at school and then go to Pearson’s drugstore on Linn Street for a cup of coffee with “the boys”—the four or five retired gentlemen known as the Midwestern Mafia, who ran Iowa City. Russ’s coffee break with the boys was sacred. They were the ones who had encouraged him to run for the Iowa City school board, and they’d suggested he join the Rotary Club, where he eventually became vice president.

All of the boys were now dead, and Russ hadn’t been involved with local politics or the Rotary Club in over a decade. Irene occasionally bumped into someone from that previous life—Cherie Werner, for example, wife of the former superintendent of schools. Cherie (or whoever) would ask after Russ and then add, “We always knew he would make it big someday,” as though Russ were a movie star or the starting quarterback for the Chicago Bears.

But who from Iowa City remained in Russ’s everyday life? No one, really.

Now that the business of Milly’s death has been handled—her body delivered to the funeral home, her personal effects collected, the probate attorney from Brown Deer enlisted to settle her estate—Irene has no choice but to face the daunting task of contacting the family attorney, Ed Sorley, to tell him about Russ.

“Irene!” Ed says. His voice contains cheerful curiosity. “I didn’t expect to hear from you again so soon. Everything okay?”