Marge buried her grandson three years back. A boy named Tyler. He died of an infection that shouldn’t have killed a healthy nineteen-year-old. She told me once that cooking the lunch for his funeral was the only thing that got her out of bed that week. Because grief with your hands busy is a different animal than grief with your hands empty.
And I’ll say my own truth plainly.
My Hollis has been gone six years now. That kitchen was the place where I still felt like somebody’s wife. Somebody’s neighbor. Somebody who mattered to this town, in a way that had nothing to do with being alone in a quiet house at night.
Tamra couldn’t have known any of that.
We never told her.
So we went to church on Sundays and sat in our regular pews.
Louise two rows behind me. Wanda across the aisle. Eunice and Marge up front, where Eunice can see the hymn board.
