Pure and simple irritation, as if my dead husband were a scheduling inconvenience.

“Marla,” he said.

“I’m going to say this once.

The whole world does not owe you a grief parade.

Your carrying-on is already casting a pall over the holiday and it is not even six in the morning.” Niko had been dead four months.

The Army had come to the door that July, two officers in dress uniform standing on my parents’ porch with their hats in their hands, and told me that my husband had been killed on a mission they were not at liberty to describe, in a place they were not at liberty to name.