It happened so fast my brain could not keep up with the days. One morning she was out there cutting down the dead tomato vines, and the next she was sitting on the edge of our bed, looking at her hands with a strange, blank expression.

“My arm feels heavy, Ray,” she whispered, and her voice sounded so small it made my stomach drop.

Three weeks later, we were sitting in a sterile room at the county hospital, listening to a young doctor with a clean clipboard use words like metastatic and aggressive.

He spoke in a very quiet, professional voice, but it sounded like static to me. I could not draw a breath.

Marie did not cry. She just reached over and took my hand. Her fingers were cold, and they did not smell like lavender soap anymore. They smelled like alcohol wipes and hospital sheets.

She was gone before the first hard frost.

I let the garden go. I could not go near the back porch without feeling a cold knot in my stomach.

Sarah came over and offered to clean up the yard, to pull down the dry, blackening vines and stack the wire cages against the wooden fence.

“Just leave it, Sarah,” I said, my voice sharper than I meant it to be. I did not want anyone touching her things.

So she left it.

All through November, December, and January, the yard looked like a graveyard. The wind whipped the dry vines against the fence, making a scratching sound that kept me awake at night.

I stayed inside. I ate canned soup. I watched television programs I did not care about. I did not drive the Buick. I did not go to the hardware store to talk to the other retired fellas.

I was seventy-two years old, and for the first time in my life, I was completely alone in a house that felt too big and too quiet.

The winter was long and gray, the kind of Michigan winter that seems to eat away at your bones. I kept thinking about how Marie used to handle the cold.

She would sit by the radiator with her seed catalogs, marking pages with a red pen, planning her beds for the next year.

“We need more calcium in the north bed, Ray,” she would tell me.

I would just nod and look back at my newspaper, not really listening, assuming she would always be the one to worry about the north bed. Now, there was no red pen. There were no catalogs.

The house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator hum, then stop, then start again.

I had a routine. I got up at seven. I made a pot of black coffee. I drank one mug while standing at the stove, then I sat in Marie’s chair by the window. But I never looked out at the garden. I kept the blinds pulled tight.