Chapter 6: Carl

Carl Doyle came up the porch steps at ten past two with a bakery box and a folder under his arm.

Lois watched him from the kitchen window, with a wooden spoon in her hand and her stomach in a knot.

She had spent the morning in a daze.

She had washed Ilu's bowl twice, and put it away, and taken it out again.

She had stood in the cellar at noon, with the canning shelf pushed aside, and felt the hole go cold and dead.

Just a stone wall now, a foot behind the jars.

She had sat down on the bottom step and cried for ten minutes, for a child she had known one day.

Now there was a knock at her door, and she wiped her face on her sleeve.

"Aunt Lois!" Carl called, cheerful, through the glass. "I know you're in there. I can smell the coffee."

She opened the door.

Carl was her late husband's nephew, forty-one years old, soft around the middle and pressed everywhere else.

He wore a fleece vest with a real-estate logo and a smile he'd learned at a sales seminar.

He kissed her on the cheek and walked in without being asked.

"You look tired," he said, handing over the box.

"Are you sleeping? You have to sleep, Aunt Lois. At our age we have to be careful."

"You're forty-one."

"Well. At your age."

Her smile did not move.

He had called her "Aunt Lois" since the funeral, and he had called three times a week ever since.

He always seemed to be looking at the house when he talked, not at her.

He set the folder on the kitchen table and flipped it open to a glossy brochure.

On the cover, a white-haired couple laughed beside a duck pond.

The words said Maple Court Senior Living: Your Next Chapter.

"I just want you to look at it," Carl said.

"You don't even have to say yes. It's a beautiful place."

"Three meals a day, a nurse on call."

"You wouldn't have to worry about the roof, the furnace, the snow..."

"I've lived here thirty-one years."

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