Or they were, but they were also everything else. Take in one inch, he’s lost weight, don’t charge for it is not a garment instruction; it is a woman noticing that a man is ill and deciding, quietly, to carry a little of it for him. Growing boy. New mother. She starts the new job the 14th. Every scrap of paper in that basket was a small act of attention, a record of my wife knowing a hundred people down to the size of their sleeves and the state of their lives, and I sat there holding all of it and felt something I am ashamed to name, which was jealousy.

Not of any person.

Of the knowing.

I had shared a bed with Franny for forty-one years and a breakfast table for most of them, and it came to me, in that green chair, that I could not have written a single one of those notes about my own life.

I did not know the neighbors’ sizes or troubles.

I did not know, if I am honest, all of my own daughter’s.

I had let Franny do the knowing for both of us, the way a man lets his wife remember the birthdays, and I had called it a fair division of labor, and now she was gone and I was holding a basket full of the enormous, invisible work she had done, and I understood that I had been loved by, and had somehow failed to fully see, a genuinely great woman.