Part Two: After

Arthur died in March.

It was a heart attack. He was seventy-four. He’d been out in the garage that morning, fixing the lawnmower so it would be ready for spring. He came inside, said he felt tired, and sat down on the couch.

I was in the kitchen making him a sandwich. When I came out with the plate, he was gone.

Just like that. Sitting on his side of the couch, with his crossword puzzle in his lap and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.

The funeral was at St. Luke’s on a gray Saturday. Our daughter, Kate, flew in from Denver with her husband and their two boys. Arthur’s old friends from the base came, a dozen gray-haired men in suits they hadn’t worn in years. They all told stories about Arthur that I’d never heard.

How he’d stayed late on Christmas Eve to fix a plane so a young airman could fly home to his newborn baby. How he’d quietly paid for a coworker’s dental surgery. How he’d taught half the base how to rebuild a carburetor.

I nodded and thanked them and didn’t really hear any of it.

After everyone left, the house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming.

I tried sleeping in our bed. I lay there in the dark, on my side, staring at Arthur’s empty pillow. At the dent in the mattress where he’d slept for forty-two years. I didn’t sleep at all that first night. Or the second.

On the third night, I gave up and went to the living room.

The couch I’d hated became the only place in the house where I could fall asleep.

I’d curl up on Arthur’s side, the side with the patched armrest, wrapped in his old flannel blanket. The red and black one he’d had since the Air Force. It still smelled faintly like him, like Lava soap and coffee.

I’d turn on the television so I wouldn’t have to hear the silence. Old movies. Game shows. Infomercials for kitchen knives at three in the morning.

The sagging middle would tip me toward the spot where he used to sit. And somehow, that helped.

For six months, I slept on that couch.

I ate dinner on that couch, a plate balanced on my knees. I read on that couch. I cried on that couch more times than I could count. On bad nights, I’d put my hand flat on his cushion, the way you put your hand on someone’s back to make sure they’re still breathing.

The cushion was always cool. Of course it was.

Part Three: Kate

In September, Kate came back for a long weekend.

She’s thirty-six now. She’s a pediatric nurse in Denver. She has Arthur’s laugh and my stubbornness, which is a dangerous combination. She called every day after the funeral, sometimes twice, but I could hear in her voice that she was worried.

When she walked into the house and saw the pillow and blanket on the couch, she stopped in the doorway.

“Mom,” she said. “Are you sleeping out here?”

I didn’t answer.

She set down her suitcase. She came and sat beside me. The sagging middle tipped her toward me, the way it always tipped me toward Arthur.

She took my hand.

“Mom,” she said gently. “You don’t have to keep everything exactly the way it was.”

I looked around the living room. At Arthur’s crossword books stacked on the end table. At his reading glasses, still on the side table where I’d found them. At his work boots by the back door, which I hadn’t moved since March.

At the couch.

“I know,” I said.

“Do you?” Kate asked.

She didn’t push. That’s one thing about Kate. She learned from her father that sometimes the kindest thing you can do is say one true sentence and then be quiet.

But that night, after she went to bed in her old room, I sat on the couch for a long time looking at the patched armrest.

I thought about all the times I’d begged Arthur to get rid of it. All the times he’d patted the cushion and said, This one makes you sit closer to me.

He wasn’t here anymore to sit close to.