In the days that followed, Einar slept lightly most of the time, to the sound of rain on the roof. When Alice stood unannounced one morning in the hall, the sister told her that now they needed quiet, no more visitors. Everyone on the phone list picked up, and Alice said, “We’ve started sending unannounced visitors away, no more callers!” Not counting the woman with the lemons, everyone said it was good that Einar had Alice. Alice did not dispute this. She hoped to have someone like herself with her when, someday, she was dying, even though she would prefer to enter a hospice. It was so pleasant to be in a hospice, and that night she dreamt she could fly, lustrous in her black clothes, free, she felt, and eternal. Beneath her the plowed fields, the sand beaches, the freeway verges, all of it now and forever her domain. Yet on the first of July she woke weighted down by a bronchitic cough.

On the fourth day of July, Alice met the sister on one of the neighborhood paths, and the sister said that it wouldn’t be long now. She asked Alice to go home and wait, and Alice went home and announced, “It won’t be long now.”

Late that evening, the family gathered with Einar’s comfort and joy, his cat, at his deathbed. Hands were held, a psalm was sung, and at four o’clock in the morning, Einar died in his sleep in the firm belief that he had a future before him.

∙ ∙ ∙

88On the seventh of July, Alice had a great deal to see to. She needed information about the funeral, she needed to order a wreath, and she also needed to iron her black gabardine pants. She was in the grocer’s several times, where she had to tell the same story again and again, about how the entire thing had ended so peacefully. As for Einar’s beloved tomcat, rumor had it that it sat at the dead man’s feet, meowing. The rumor caught up with Alice by the revolving door of the supermarket, and the family shouldn’t have to worry about that cat. It was past noon when Alice turned up at the dead man’s house with a carrier. The sister seemed red-eyed and relieved, and Alice said, “From now on, the cat officially lives with me,” and the mortician who poked his head out from the dead man’s bedroom also seemed relieved. It wasn’t easy getting the cat stuffed into the carrier, it snarled and scratched her. But once she was home she put it in the bathroom and called the vet. He had an open spot late in the afternoon, and the cat got its needle and died in its sleep in the belief that it had a future before it.