I actively hope she is all right.

I never want to see her at a table again.

Both of those are true and I’ve stopped apologizing for the second one.

Part Fifteen: The Woman in the Doorway

Wendy Aldarossi came to my house every Thursday for eleven years.

She died in February, at seventy-eight, of the thing her cardiologist had been watching, in her own bed, which is more than most people get.

I sat in the second row at her funeral, behind her children, next to my own, and her son sat six feet away and we did not speak, and afterward at the house I stood in her kitchen and put her spice shelf back into the order she liked, and cried harder than I cried about my marriage.