A Permanent Member of the Family

SNOWBIRDS

Finally, after years of weighing her pros against his cons, Isabel and George Pelham agreed to shut down their home in the upstate hamlet of Keene, New York, and spend the five winter months together in a rented condominium in Miami Beach. The condo was a two-bedroom sparsely furnished unit on the twenty-second floor of a high-rise on Biscayne Bay, away from the hotels and nightlife. If they liked the neighborhood and made some friends, they would become snowbirds. For a year. That was as much as George would agree to.

Then, barely a month into that first winter, at the end of his fourth tennis lesson at the Flamingo Park public courts, George dropped to his knees as if he’d won the final at Wimbledon and died of a heart attack. On the recommendation of the young intern who certified his death, Isabel called O’Dell’s Funeral Home and Crematorium from Mount Sinai Medical Center, where the ambulance had delivered George’s body. Then she telephoned her best friend, Jane Deane.

Jane was sitting at her desk in her office at High Peaks Country Day School when the call came. She was the guidance counselor at the school and a part-time psychotherapist in a town where, in the absence of full-time jobs, people more often than not had to rely on two part-time jobs, a reliance in Jane’s case enforced by her husband Frank’s inability to find work of any kind since losing his Adirondack furniture shop six months ago. Her practice was called Peaks & Passes Counseling.

“Jane, George is dead,” Isabel announced. “He’s gone. He had a heart attack this morning, playing tennis. George is gone, Jane!”

“Oh, my God! Are you okay, honey? Is anyone there with you?” A tall, slender woman with dark, gray-streaked hair cut short, younger than Isabel by a decade, Jane had worked alongside Isabel and George since graduating college, until three years ago when the older couple retired from teaching, Isabel at sixty taking early retirement and George at seventy taking late. Jane liked George, there was nothing about him not to like, but Isabel she loved the way you love an older, wiser sister.

One of the work-study students, a junior girl in a dark green dirndl and hiking boots, clumped through the open door of Jane’s office, laid a packet of file folders on the desk, and when Jane waved her away without making eye contact, clumped out in a pout.

“No, I’m alone. Except for the doctor. I don’t really know anyone here yet,” Isabel said and began to cry.

“I’ll come down to Florida, Isabel. I’ll take an emergency leave from school and fly right down to help you get through this.”

“No, no, you shouldn’t do that! I’ll be okay. I’ll call George’s family, his sister and his brothers. They’ll come down. Don’t you worry about me,” she said and broke off in order to cry again.

“I’ll cancel everything and be there by tomorrow afternoon,” Jane declared.

Isabel gulped air between sentences. She said, “It’s just so goddam bizarre, you know? For him to die in Florida, when we only just got here! I was hoping he’d love it here. He was having a tennis lesson. How ridiculous is that? What will I do, Jane? I’m all alone here. I feel lost without him!”

Jane assured her that she wasn’t alone, that she had many close friends, and she had George’s family members from Connecticut and Cooperstown, who would surely be a comfort to her, and she had Jane and Frank, although she didn’t mention that Frank had not been especially fond of George, thought him smug and self-righteous, and while he liked Isabel, he considered her to be Jane’s friend, not his.

“George’s family. Right. They’ll probably blame it on me for talking him into coming here in the first place. And they’d be right,” she said and went back to crying.

“Don’t say that! He would have had a heart attack shoveling snow, for heaven’s sake.”

TWO HOURS LATER, having selected a simple mahogany urn for George’s ashes at O’Dell’s Funeral Home and Crematorium on the mainland, Isabel drove their five-year-old Subaru Outback onto the nearby lot of Sunshine Chrysler on Northwest Twelfth and traded it in for a lease on a new dark brown 200S Chrysler convertible.

The following morning, her best friend, Jane, drove from Keene to Albany in her slightly older Subaru Outback, parked the car in the long-term lot and flew to Miami for George Pelham’s funeral. She planned on staying with Isabel for three or four days. Maybe a week. As long as it took to console her friend and help her with the logistics of sudden widowhood. The school headmaster, Dr. Costanza, assured Jane that she could spend all of her accumulated sick days if need be. It wasn’t as if she had classes to meet. Everyone on the faculty and in town held George and Isabel dearly to their breast, was how Dr. Costanza put it.

Jane found his manner of speaking, like his bow ties and argyle sweater vests, faintly amusing, and sometimes when speaking with him she imitated it. She said she’d reveal her plans to him as soon as they blossomed and revealed themselves to her.

Though Jane’s husband, Frank, had never been close to the Pelhams — he was what was called a Keene native; the Pelhams, like his wife, were “from away,” as local people put it — he respected Jane’s friendship with Isabel and told her to stay down there in Florida as long as she wanted. He’d be in hunting camp up on Johns Brook with the guys for the next week anyhow. Maybe longer if he didn’t kill his deer right off. They could pull in Ryan whatzizname, you know, the Hall kid, to take care of the dogs.

WHEN ISABEL ARRIVED to meet Jane at the Miami airport in her Chrysler convertible, top down, Jane was thrown off by the warm, welcoming smile on her friend’s broad, suntanned face. No grief-stricken tears, no trembling lips. Jane tossed her suitcase onto the backseat, got in and hugged Isabel long and hard, a consoling hug. Isabel was smaller than Jane, trim, and for a woman, especially a woman her age, muscular. She wore a white silk T-shirt and a flouncy pale blue cotton skirt and sandals.

Not exactly funereal, Jane thought. Taking in the new car, she said, “I like the color, Isabel. I bet it’s called something like ‘espresso.’ Am I right?” Actually, she did like the color and hoped she didn’t sound sarcastic.

“Ha! It’s called ‘tungsten metallic.’ I wanted ‘billet silver metallic,’ but this was the only convertible they had on the lot, and I wanted a convertible more. So, listen, do you mind if we pick up George’s ashes on the way home? Since we’re in Digger O’Dell the Friendly Undertaker’s neighborhood.”

Jane said no, she didn’t mind. Isabel’s jaunty tone confused her. “Is his name really Digger O’Dell?”

Isabel laughed. “No, but he is friendly. Maybe too friendly. I think it’s Rick. Ricardo O’Dell. He’s Latino, despite the name. Argentine, maybe.”

While she drove she punched a string of numbers into her cell phone. Steering with one hand and holding the phone to her ear with the other, Isabel cut swiftly — expertly, Jane thought, for someone who never drove in traffic like this — through the snarl of cloverleafs and on- and off-ramps that surrounded the airport. In minutes they were up on Route 112 speeding east toward Biscayne Bay.

Isabel pulled into the sunbaked lot next to the large cinder-block cube that O’Dell’s Funeral Home shared with a tire store, and parked. She asked Jane if she’d like to come inside with her. “It’s kind of creepy,” she said, “but interesting.” Rick O’Dell had told her he’d be with a client in the Comfort Room when she arrived, but he’d leave the urn with her husband’s cremains in the reception area. She could simply take them. Nothing to sign.

Jane said sure, she had never been in a crematorium before. She felt rushed by Isabel, pushed into doing something she’d prefer to avoid, but decided to let it go. Isabel was probably experiencing a wave of grief-induced mania. A way of not succumbing to grief itself. Sometimes that happened after the death of a spouse.

They entered a darkened, windowless hallway. There was a plastic folding lawn chair by the door at the far end, and on the chair a small cardboard carton with a yellow Post-it note stuck to it. On the note someone had written Isabel Pelham in red Magic Marker ink.

“I’m reasonably certain that the ashes inside that box are George’s, not mine,” Isabel said.

“God, I can’t tell if you’re being morbid or funny.”

“Both.”

“Let’s go. This whole thing is freaking me out a little,” Jane said and turned to leave.

“Wait. Check that out.” Beyond the door was a larger room, a showroom of some kind, lit by flickering fluorescent ceiling lights. On a high four-wheeled cart in the middle of the otherwise empty room was a white casket with its lid up. The interior of the casket was lined in rolled and pleated white patent leather. Except for what appeared to be a bowling ball inside an aqua ball bag, the casket was empty. A vacuum cleaner tank and a length of coiled vacuum hose and extension tubes lay on the tile floor beside the cart.

“Check that out. Don’t you just love Miami?” Isabel whispered. She pulled her iPhone from her purse and snapped four quick photos of the scene. “It’s so fucking surreal here. Everywhere you look. I’m thinking of buying a real camera and taking pictures of everything. Might be a whole new career.” They could hear the muffled voice of a man speaking Spanish in the Comfort Room farther down the hall.

“That would be Digger O’Dell, the Friendly Undertaker. Comforting some poor widow in the Comfort Room with his hand on her knee. Or maybe they’re in the crematorium. I wonder where that is. Probably the basement.”

She made a move to enter the showroom, but Jane grabbed her sleeve and stopped her. Jane said, “Jesus, Isabel, let’s go now. You’ve got what we came for.”

Isabel lifted the small cardboard box from the chair and opened it. Inside was a polished mahogany container the approximate size and shape of an old-fashioned milk bottle. “Like it?”

“The urn? Yes, it’s… tasteful.”

Isabel held the container by the neck and examined it slowly. “Hard to imagine all of George coming down to just this. Ashes to ashes, I suppose. He was such a big man, over two hundred pounds. Reduced to a pint or so of ashes. ‘Cremains.’ Want to take a look?” she said and started to unscrew the black plastic top.

“Jesus, no! Not here. C’mon, Isabel, let’s just go now!” Jane said and walked quickly down the hallway to the door, opened it and stepped into the blinding sunlight.

LIKE A REALTOR TRYING to sell her the apartment, Isabel took Jane on what she called The Tour, first the condo and then the public areas of the building, and Jane learned that her newly widowed friend was planning to live alone in Miami Beach in the high-rise condominium on Sunset Harbour Drive with spectacular views of Biscayne Bay and the downtown Miami skyline across the bay. There was a pool in the building and a health club. An attractive marble-floored lobby with an attendant on duty day and night and twenty-four-hour camera surveillance. Isabel demonstrated how from her glass-walled aerie she could watch the glittering cruise ships glide silently out to sea. She could look down from the terrace and observe the seagulls and pelicans from above. She could spy with binoculars on lovers and smugglers and partygoers in their yachts moored at the yacht club adjacent to her building. Which was how she spoke of it, Jane noticed, as her building. Previously in their weekly phone conversations she had called it our building.

There was something weird going on with Isabel, Jane thought. She was not prepared for her friend’s sprightliness or her suddenly fortified willfulness and new enthusiasms. This was not the Isabel she had known for more than half a lifetime, the woman she had come here to console.

Isabel said, “I love that there are so many blacks in the building and that most people in the city speak Spanish. I never realized how sick I was of being surrounded by people who look and sound just like me. I’m going to learn Spanish,” she said. “You hear a lot of Haitian Creole, too. I’m becoming a permanent legal resident of Florida,” she added. “I’d rather vote here where my vote counts, rather than in New York where I’m just another liberal Democrat. I made an appointment this morning online to get my Florida driver’s license.”

“Will you live here year-round?”

“I’ll probably use the Keene house in the summer months. At least for now.”

“I thought you and George planned on eventually moving into that Christian retirement community, the one down in Saratoga Springs. What’s it called, Harmony Hills?” They were Episcopalians, the Pelhams, not really churchy, but believers. And do-gooders, as Frank called them. At least George was. For years he had spent his summer vacations building houses for Habitat for Humanity. Isabel was sort of a New Age Christian, Jane thought. Isabel and George were more conventionally religious than Jane, who described herself as a Buddhist, and her husband, Frank, who’d been raised Catholic but pointedly claimed to be an agnostic, as if it were a religion.

Isabel said, “God, no. That place was always George’s idea. Not mine. He turned seventy-three last June and planned to check into Harmony Hills before he turned seventy-five. While he could still enjoy it, he used to say.”

Jane knew all this, but had never done the math. “Wow. If he’d lived, you’d only be, what, sixty-four? Awfully young to be living in an old-age home, Isabel.”

“No kidding. We had a crisis coming down the road like a sixteen-wheeler. It’s not really an old-age home, though. It’s called an ‘adult community,’ with an assisted-living facility and a nursing home attached, so as your body and mind deteriorate you get shuttled from one stage to the next without having to leave the premises until you’re dead. So, yeah. Close call.”

THE FUNERAL SERVICE was held at All Souls Episcopal Church with a small group in attendance. The urn holding George’s ashes was placed on a pedestal in the nave with George’s Yale class of 1962 yearbook photograph beside it. George’s tennis coach was present, along with the rental agent for their condo and six or eight acquaintances from the building, retired northerners, couples they had intended to get to know better but hadn’t quite got around to yet. Otherwise the congregation was made up of George’s three siblings and a sprinkling of their spouses, children and grandchildren. And Jane, of course, who sat in the front pew next to Isabel throughout the brief service, after having declined the priest’s invitation to say a few words about George, share a few memories, tell a personal anecdote about George’s lifelong love of the Adirondack Mountains, which the priest mistakenly called the Appalachian Mountains. Jane was slightly phobic about public speaking. One of George’s younger brothers spoke of George’s love of the Adirondacks, and one of his nephews reminded the gathering of George’s willingness to write recommendation letters to Groton, his alma mater, whenever a male Pelham applied for admission.

Except for Jane, there were no representatives from the High Peaks Country Day School or the town of Keene. Which made sense, Jane said to Isabel when she groused about the absence of mourners from the north. It was an expensive full day’s travel each way, and most people up there no doubt assumed that there would be a memorial service in Keene in June or July, after school let out and the summer people who knew George personally had come back from their winter homes and Isabel had returned from her own sojourn here in Miami Beach.

“Yeah, right,” Isabel said. “If I return to Keene for the summer. And if I decide to hold a memorial service.”

AT THE RECEPTION back at the condominium, Isabel set the urn with George’s ashes on top of the sideboard in the dining area, then stood next to the urn as if to lend George’s authority to her words and announced in public for the first time that she had decided to stay on alone in the condo in Miami Beach for the rest of the winter. “I’ll have George’s ashes to keep me company,” she said. “But only until I take them back to Keene and scatter them from the top of Mount Marcy, which is what he always said he wanted. By then I should be able to live without him beside me any longer.”

She added that she planned to use George’s life insurance money to buy the condo they’d been renting and from now on she’d winter over here permanently. She was so uncharacteristically firm that no one in George’s extended family tried to dissuade her.

After the other mourners had departed, George’s family members, who were staying at the Lido on Belle Isle, took the opportunity to go out for Chinese food. They wanted to discuss among themselves George’s money, most of which, since he and Isabel were childless, would soon belong to Isabel. George and Isabel had worked as underpaid teachers their entire married lives and between them had built up a million-dollar TIAA-CREF retirement account. But George, his two brothers and his sister were descended from early-twentieth-century owners of mountains of Minnesota iron ore plus several subsidiary steel-dependent industries in Pittsburgh, and George’s portion of the family estate was many times the size of his half of their TIAA-CREF account. From the start George had micromanaged both his and Isabel’s modest personal finances, so there was reason for the family to fear that their sister-in-law, who as far as they knew had never paid a bill on her own or written a check for more than the weekly groceries, would not be a responsible custodian of her new wealth.

George had taught math and geometry, but Isabel had taught literature and art history, and the family viewed her as mildly eccentric, possibly artistic. Isabel’s background did not reassure them, either. Her parents had owned and operated a small motel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A bright only child, she had been a scholarship student at Smith when she met George, who had just taken a teaching position at nearby Deerfield Academy. They hoped that George had had the foresight to establish a trust naming one or all three of his siblings as trustees, a trust that would provide Isabel with a monthly income sufficient to cover her ongoing expenses, while preserving the rest of George’s estate for future generations of Pelhams. They wished they had discussed this eventuality with him years ago. But when it came to money, George, like his siblings, was as closemouthed as he was tightfisted, and no one had been willing to broach the subject with him.

ISABEL AND JANE, like teenagers, ate standing in front of the open refrigerator, picking with chopsticks from cartons of leftover take-out curried chicken salad and couscous. Afterward, Isabel opened a chilled New Zealand sauvignon blanc, and she and Jane went out onto the balcony, carrying their wineglasses and the bottle. They sat and drank and watched the evening sun slide across the darkening sky. The coin-sized buttery yellow disc, when it slipped behind the skyscrapers and glass and steel office towers on the far side of Biscayne Bay, swiftly turned into a large scarlet fireball.

Isabel said, “Look at how when the sun gets halfway below the horizon you can literally see it move. It’s like the way the sand in an hourglass pours faster and faster as it nears the end. I should know why that happens, but I don’t. George would’ve known why. Something to do with optics and geometry, probably.”

“Something to do with time,” Jane said and refilled her glass from the bottle on the table between them. “So, what will you do now?”

“Interesting how we use ‘so’ to signal a change of subject. Anyhow, what’ll I do now that George’s gone?”

“Yes. In your rapidly encroaching old age.”

“I’m old, Janey, but not elderly. Not yet, anyhow. George liked to solve problems before they happen. I like to solve them after they happen.”

“And now you can do that? Solve your problems after they happen?”

“Right.”

“I suppose it’s like when Frank needs some R and R he takes his gun or his fishing rods, depending on the season, and heads for camp with his male hunting and fishing buddies, and they tell lies and drink and let their beards grow and don’t bathe. When I need R and R, I go down to the monastery in Woodstock and sit zazen for a long weekend.”

“No, it’s not like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t have to choose between them. The huntin’ and fishin’ boys’ camp in the woods versus the monastery with the Buddhists. I had to choose. The Linger Longer Retirement Home for Old People in Saratoga with George versus a condo in Miami Beach with no one. One or the other. Not much of a choice.”

“And now you don’t have to choose.”

“No, now I can choose. And I’m choosing a condo in Miami Beach with no one.”

“Well, I just meant that Frank and I are different. The way you and George are… were different.”

“Right. So, Janey, to change the subject, can you stay on for a few days after everyone leaves?” Isabel asked. “I’m going to need help moving George’s things into storage, his clothes and personal stuff, things I don’t need or want. I’d just as soon keep his family out of it for now. I’d like to sort it out without them hovering over my shoulder. They’re not exactly vultures, but they keep mental and computerized inventories of just about everything. Like George did.”

Jane said, “I remember how very neat and orderly he was. But I always admired him for that. Not like Frank.”

“Right, he was not like Frank. More like you,” she said and laughed.

“In some ways, maybe. Are you okay, Isabel? You seem… I don’t know, like you’re holding back your grief. Your loss.”

“You mean, am I in what you shrinks call denial? Probably. Down the road I’m sure I’ll feel crushed by his absence. I was so used to his presence. But right now the truth is I feel liberated by it. And only a little guilty,” she said. “And he didn’t suffer. We should all be as lucky.”

ISABEL WENT TO BED EARLY — to avoid the company of George’s siblings and their spouses and mostly grown children and grandchildren, Jane figured. Despite an arduous and stressful day, Isabel hadn’t seemed in the slightest tired. The opposite, in fact.

Instead of heading back to the Lido, where they had booked a string of rooms, the family lingered another half hour at the condo with Jane. It was a very chic hotel, they kept repeating, as if slightly confused and threatened by its stylishness and worried about the cost. They would have preferred to stay over on the mainland in a Marriott or Holiday Inn, but had wanted to take rooms close to their brother’s condominium, they said, in case their sister-in-law needed their ongoing comfort and help, which evidently she did not.

When finally they left, Jane washed the glasses and shut out the lights one by one and went into the guest bedroom. She knew that Frank expected her to call tonight, because tomorrow he’d be in camp and out of cell phone range for at least a week. But she did not want to talk with him. She did not want to look at herself and Isabel through her husband’s critical eyes. Not tonight, anyhow, when her views of herself and her best friend were so indistinct and shifting. She sat on the bed in the guest room and decided to send him a text. She preferred whenever possible to send texts instead of speaking on the phone — with texts she was more in control of what she said and heard and when she said and heard it. Fewer surprises that way. Jane did not like surprises.

She thumb-typed: I solve problems before they happen, and u solve them after they happen. She read the text over three times, then deleted it. She began again and this time wrote: When I need R & R I go 2 the monastery. When u need R & R u go 2 your man-cave. She half laughed to herself and deleted this text, too.

She stood and walked to the window and looked out. A half moon hung in the southwest quadrant of the sky. The lights of the city glistened on the rippled black surface of the bay, and the headlights of cars on the arched causeway steadily crossing from the mainland to Miami Beach looked like gold beads sliding down a string. She could understand how the prospect of living out her sixties and then her seventies and maybe even her eighties alone in Miami Beach had excited Isabel. It was a new world, a semitropical, Latin American city where everything worked because it was not in Latin America. A wholly new life awaited her here. After almost forty years of marriage, Isabel, like any woman, had made so many small compromises and concessions to align her view of what was desirable and necessary with her husband’s view that she probably didn’t know any longer what was desirable and necessary to herself alone. Jane understood how, suddenly cut loose from George’s cautious, reticent nature, Isabel might find the idea of living here six months a year exciting, enticing, liberating. Becoming a snowbird was the really big thing, the thing that George himself would never have embraced. He might have been willing to try it out, but only to demonstrate what a bad idea it was.

In many ways it was a young person’s city — especially over here in Miami Beach, a chain of barrier islands made glamorous by movies and television, made famous by drugs and violence and illicit wealth and stylish by fashion shoots and art deco architecture. It seemed that every smart, ambitious person under thirty who couldn’t get to New York City or Los Angeles came to Miami. And it was also a city where for generations elderly people from the north had come to sit on benches in the park with the sun on their faces, an unread book or newspaper on their laps, while they waited for their breathing to stop. Isabel was not a young person drawn to the glamour, fame and style of Miami Beach, obviously; but neither was she one of those old people waiting to die. Jane stood at the window with her cell phone in her hand and typed: Isabel in v. rough shape. May need to stay here longer than planned. Call me when back from camp. XX J. She quickly hit send—before she had a chance to hit delete.

GEORGE’S FAMILY FLEW BACK to their homes, jobs and schools in New England and upstate New York, and the following day Isabel and Jane turned to packing George’s belongings. With the convertible top down and Jane in the passenger’s seat, Isabel drove to the OfficeMax on West Avenue and bought a half-dozen banker’s boxes plus several larger cartons, packing tape, labels and Magic Markers. On the way back she stopped off at the Public Storage facility on West and Dade and reserved a five-by-ten-foot climate-controlled storage unit. Then the women went for a long lunch at the outdoor bookstore café on Lincoln Road.

When they had ordered lunch, Isabel lifted her water glass and declared, “I’m really glad, Jane, that you of all people can be here with me in Miami Beach. I’m really glad I can share both the work and the pleasures of setting up my new life with you.” She extended her glass, and Jane clinked it with hers.

Jane said, “Actually, I came mainly to hold your hand and help you cope with George’s death. This is a lot more… I don’t know, fun, I guess. More than it should be. So it’s like a guilty pleasure. You don’t need much hand-holding, and you seem to be coping surprisingly well. If I lost Frank…,” she said and trailed off. She watched a pair of Rollerbladers, suntanned, hard-bodied men in their twenties, shirtless and hairless in tight shorts and wraparound sunglasses. They darted past the café and swooped like raptors through the shoppers and gawkers strolling along the sidewalk and were gone. “If I lost Frank…,” she began again, “well, for one thing, I’d be unable to hold on to the house. We’re second-mortgaged to our eyeballs, first to help the girls finish college, now to help them pay off their college loans. The last few years, with the store failing and Frank out of work a lot, it’s been mean. At times we’ve had to live pretty much on my income alone, which ain’t much to shout about, believe me. But I guess it’s different for you,” she said.

“Financially, yes. My little pension from High Peaks Country Day and our joint account at Adirondack Bank should more than cover my living expenses until I go back up to Keene and settle the estate. Something I can’t say to anyone, except you, Janey, so don’t quote me,” she said and lowered her voice, “but knowing that soon I’ll be a very wealthy woman has made George’s death a lot easier to bear,” she said. “Sounds awful. But it’s true.”

“I thought you loved Frank!” Jane said. “I mean George. I thought you loved George.”

Isabel smiled. “Of course I loved him! And I’ll miss him terribly. We were married thirty-seven years. And I could concentrate on that, on what I’ve lost. Maybe I should. Most widows would. Or I could concentrate on what I had, thirty-seven years of companionship, and be thankful. But when you spend your life married to someone and he dies, in a sense you die, too. Unless you choose to be reborn as someone else, as someone unformed. And then it’s almost like you get to be an adolescent girl again. And right now, that’s how I’m feeling. Like an adolescent girl. Honestly, Janey, I haven’t felt this way since I was fifteen!”

“So weren’t you guys happily married? I always thought you were happy together. Like me and Frank.”

“Well, sure, Janey! A lot like you and Frank. Better keep that in mind, girlfriend,” she said and laughed.

JANE WAS TOUCHED by how neatly George had arranged his clothing. She could picture him taking his clothes out of the dryer and carefully folding each item. His socks were rolled and lined up in rows by color, shirts folded and stacked in their drawer by color and fabric, neckties racked in the closet by stripes, patterns and solids, suits, sports jackets and slacks hung by color and material from light to dark, thin to heavy, shoes lined up in pairs on the floor beneath his suits and jackets like the front paws of large mammals, brown first, then black, then sneakers. Even his underwear was folded and stacked for easy access, as in a men’s clothing store. “George liked to say he did it so he could dress in the dark if he had to,” Isabel said. “But he never had to.”

The files that George had shipped down from Keene for the winter, so many that he’d installed a two-drawer cabinet in their bedroom to hold them, now filled four banker’s boxes. Isabel said he was a pack rat who carried his pack with him. She’d decide next winter which files to keep and which to shred, she said. Most could go. For now she would hold back only the papers and records she’d need for negotiating the purchase of the condo. She’d close on it in the summer, after George’s estate and insurance were settled. To get the paperwork started she had already scanned and e-mailed digital copies of George’s death certificate to Ron Briggs, his attorney in Lake Placid, and Tim Lynch, his insurance agent. The reading of George’s last will and testament could not occur until Isabel met with Briggs, who had drawn it up and had amended and revised it annually according to George’s changing instructions. She did not know what was in her husband’s will and had never had much desire to know. It was like his investment portfolio — not really her business — more his hobby or a low-intensity obsession than money management, just something he enjoyed poring over, rearranging and reconfiguring on his computer late at night before coming up to bed.

The two women loaded the boxes into the convertible, filling the trunk and backseat, and drove to the Public Storage building, where they placed George’s personal belongings and papers in Unit 1032, clicked the lock and left. The process left Jane feeling dazed and dazzled, inexplicably thrilled, as if she and Isabel had successfully pulled off a crime, a burglary or bank robbery. In the car on the way back to the condo, Jane shouted above the rush of the wind, “We should’ve put George’s ashes in the storage unit with all his stuff! His cremains! Is that really what they’re called, ‘cremains’?”

“Yeah, according to Digger O’Dell. But you’re right! We should put George in storage with his other stuff! The urn’s still at the condo, on the sideboard. I completely forgot to pack it.”

“We should get him now,” Jane said. “The ashes. I mean, it. The urn.”

“George.”

ISABEL PLACED THE WOODEN URN on the dining room table, drew up a chair and sat down. She slowly unscrewed the top, but did not remove it. “I don’t know why, but this is suddenly making me nervous,” she said. “It’s like this is the last time I’ll ever see my husband. Or maybe it’s the first time. As if all those years married to him I never truly saw him, and now what I refused to acknowledge is inside this jug.”

Jane said that didn’t make any sense. There was nothing inside the urn but a half pound of ashes. “Okay, human ashes. George’s ashes. But it’s inert matter, Isabel. It’s not George.”

“I know, I know. But since he died, I’ve been feeling high, almost stoned, more excited by my life than I’ve felt in years. Maybe ever. I guess that’s been obvious. But now all of a sudden, after not giving a good goddamn, I’m almost ashamed for not having acted properly bereft and mournful. Of not even feeling bereft and mournful. And I’m fucking scared, Jane. It’s like George, pissed off and vengeful, is trapped inside this wooden jug like an evil genie inside a magic lantern, and by taking off the top I’m freeing him to torment and haunt me.”

“You don’t have to open it. You can leave the evil genie locked away forever,” Jane said and reached for the urn. She grabbed it by the neck, but Isabel held on and pulled back. The cover flipped off, and both women let go at the same instant, and gray and white ashes emptied onto the table. The urn rolled away and fell onto the tile floor.

“Oh, my God!” Jane said. “I’m so sorry!”

Isabel said, “My fault. It was my fault.” She pushed her chair back from the table a ways and, still seated, leaned forward and examined the pile of ashes closely. Extending her right hand, she drew her forefinger through the spilled ashes, moving her finger back and forth, spreading the heap across the table, as if searching for a lost ring, some small remnant of her marriage, or an omen that would tell her how to live her life in the future. What she uncovered were six steel buttons, which she gathered one by one into her left hand. “Look!” she said and held them out to Jane.

“What?”

“These are U.S. Navy buttons. At least, I think that’s what the anchors signify.”

“So?”

“They’re not George’s. He was never in the Navy. He was a conscientious objector during Vietnam and worked at McLean, the Boston mental hospital. Then went into teaching. He never wore a military uniform. He never owned anything with buttons like this.”

“So this isn’t George?”

For a long moment the two women looked at each other in silence. Finally Isabel shook her head and said, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’m actually relieved this isn’t George. Of course, it isn’t. These ashes aren’t anybody!”

“Should we return the ashes to Digger O’Dell, the Friendly Undertaker?” Jane asked. “Or just vacuum them up and when the job is done toss the vacuum cleaner bag down the rubbish chute?” Jane started to laugh, a tight little giggle at first, then larger, long laughs that made it difficult to speak. Isabel joined her, and soon both women were bellowing with laughter, nearly choking with it, tears streaming down their cheeks. The absurdity of it, the ridiculousness, the idiocy of thinking the ashes were not just George’s ashes, but were actually him, George Pelham himself, come back to haunt his newly emancipated widow!

When she was finally able to brake and slow her laughter, Jane said, “You realize that somebody out there has your George in a jar. But if we take this jar back to the Digger, if we demand that he exchange it for George, assuming he even knows who he gave George to, what the hell good will it do?”

It was pointless to try to exchange these ashes for George, Isabel said. Pointless, and cruel to whoever actually had George and did not know yet that they did not possess the cremated body of their husband or father. Probably by now George had already been cast from the stern of a boat into the Gulf Stream or scattered across the green waters of Biscayne Bay, Isabel reasoned, or else he was enshrined on a living room altar, surrounded by votive candles, statues of saints and orishas, baby shoes, cowrie shell necklaces and hen’s feet. Which would really piss George off. “I’m starting to love thinking the ashes are actually a person. A stranger.”

“How do you know these are a man’s ashes, though? Someone’s husband or father,” Jane asked.

“Oh, I can feel it. You can always feel it when a man’s in the house. They tend to soak up all the available energy.”

“So what are we going to do with them? We can’t just vacuum them up and toss the vacuum bag down the chute.”

“Why not?”

“Yeah! Why not?”

LATER, THE TWO WOMEN SAT OUT on the terrace sipping white wine, once again watching the sun set behind the Miami skyline. From somewhere inside the apartment, Jane’s cell phone rang. “That would be Frank,” she said. After waiting half a minute, she sighed, put down her glass and left the terrace to answer it. The phone was in her purse on the bed in the guest room, and she managed to get there before call answering kicked in. It was Frank.

She knew instantly that he was angry, though he tried to hide it. “Glad I caught you,” he said. “Thought you and Isabel might be out on the town tonight.”

She said no, they were going to stay in and watch a movie. She asked him if he’d killed his deer. She had learned years ago to ask that way, not to ask if he “got” or “shot” a deer. And it was his deer, not a deer.

He said yes, a 127-pound six-pointer, butchered, wrapped and already in the freezer. “Killed him over on the north side of Baxter with a single shot at fifty yards. So when are you planning to come home?” he asked. It was more a directive than a question.

She said, “Unclear.” Which was the truth, she realized as soon as she said it.

“Yeah, well, okay. But that night security job at Whiteface Lodge, it finally came through. I have to start tomorrow at midnight. The house is a mess,” he added.

“Well, clean it up, then.”

“I won’t have time. On account of working the night shift. I was just letting you know in advance, in case you come home tomorrow night. I was hoping you could get back up here soon. Your boss, Dr. Costanza, he’s been calling from the school. He left a couple messages asking if you planned on resuming work soon. That’s how he put it. I didn’t return his call, since I didn’t have an answer for him. You want me to call him?”

She said no, she’d take care of that herself. She sat down on the bed, placed the phone on her lap for a second, then put it back to her ear.

He was in the middle of saying, “So when are you coming back?”

She didn’t answer.

Isabel stood in the guest room doorway, wineglass in hand. She looked at Jane with a steady, unblinking gaze and mouthed the words, Stay as long as you want.

Jane looked intently back and nodded. She said to her husband, “Frank, I really don’t know when I’m coming back.”

“That doesn’t sound so good. Is it on account of Isabel, or on account of you?”

She hesitated, then answered, “Both.”

Frank was silent for a moment. He said, “It’s supposed to snow this weekend, according to the Channel Five guy, Tom Messner. Up to a foot. It was minus ten this morning. It’s minus five here at the house right now. ”

“It was eighty here today, and sunny. It’s pretty much like that every day here.”

“Wow. Except for hurricane season, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Except for hurricane season.” She said she had to go, it was time for the movie. She wished him luck tomorrow at his new job. He thanked her, and they said goodbye to each other and clicked off.

Isabel set her glass on the bedside table and sat down beside Jane and put her arms around her. It was almost a motherly gesture at first, comforting, consoling, the kind of embrace Jane had expected to give to Isabel, not to receive from her. It made Jane believe for a moment that she could be fearless, as fearless as Isabel, that she could be reborn as someone else, as someone unformed, and that, like Isabel, she could become an adolescent girl again. She laid her head on Isabel’s shoulder and smelled her perfume mixed with sweat, and a chill like the shadow of a cloud passing below the sun moved over her arms and shoulders, and when the chill had passed, it was as if the sun had emerged from behind the cloud, and a great warmth covered her body.

For a long moment they held their positions, as if each were waiting for the other to decide what they both would do or say next. And when neither woman decided, they both let their arms drop and turned toward the open door and the living room beyond and beyond that the floor-to-ceiling window and the terrace, the bay twenty-two stories below and the city at the far side of the bay and the setting sun bursting scarlet at the horizon like a fireball, painting the ragged gray clouds above the bay with cerise stripes.

For a long while neither woman said anything. Finally Isabel spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “I would be happy if you stayed here.”

“Until?”

“Until you decide what you want.”

Jane stood and walked slowly to the door. For a second, she stopped at the door. She knew that tomorrow morning she would leave for home, for Keene, for the wintry north, for her husband, the father of her two grown daughters, her dour companion and the permanent witness to her remaining years. She turned around and looked back at Isabel, who was standing next to the bed, watching her, and realized that she had already said to Isabel everything that needed saying.