Don was looking beyond me, his face strangely blank. I turned and saw Mr. Hoover standing there looking at us. He had a box in his hand. It was a small cardboard box tied with brown cord. He looked at me. He had heard me. He looked tired and puzzled. He held the box awkwardly. No one spoke. Even the little brother seemed quelled, though he could not have understood the implications of the situation.
Mr. Hoover turned abruptly away and walked down the porch steps. I followed slowly; there were no words I could say. I could not say that my words meant nothing, that I bled inside, that by my disloyalty to her memory I was salting fresh wounds. It started to rain, harder than before, as he walked out to his car. He stopped by the car in the rain and looked back at me, still with that look of incomprehension. I can see him standing there. The car is high and square. He wears a wide mourning band on the sleeve of his gray suit. He got in and pulled the door shut and drove away.
I never learned what was in the box. I guessed that it contained some of Judy’s things, things they thought I might like to have. She died ten days before my birthday, and I wondered, too, if it was the present she had bought me before it happened. I have often wondered what was in that box.
That is my special memory of shame. Yet on this day, driving at sixty-five toward receding mirages, I knew that the meaning of the memory had changed. The loss and sadness were there, but I could no longer think of what might have been had she stepped back. Now no other end seemed thinkable for her. It had happened long ago and far away, and distance had given it the flavor of inevitability.
The loss remained. I glanced at my wife. Her hand rested on her thigh, clamped into a square small brown fist, lightly freckled. This was Betty, and I knew her well — every shade of mood, every inch of body, every intonation. The twins, children she had given me, were singing in their small sweet toneless voices.
I thought of my love for her, summoning it up, cloaking myself in that love.
It is the only defense I have. Because every time I remember Judy, it seems to me that I have spent my whole life among strangers.
And I do not care to be so alone.
