My husband always said that as long as there was air in my lungs, there was a reason to keep going. I heard his voice say it the morning I finally decided to buy the car. I was sitting in our kitchen with a mug of coffee going cold in my hands, looking at a photograph of the two of us on the beach, both of us smiling in that easy, complete way that takes decades to grow.
He had been gone for three months. The house had become something that absorbed sound and gave nothing back. Every room held the specific gravity of him, his coffee cup, his chair, the faint ghost of his cologne.
I needed to move. Not away from him. Into the future he had always told me I deserved.
The old car had died a week after the funeral, the mechanic saying the repair would cost more than the value, and I had understood that as a kind of permission. I went to the dealership on a Tuesday morning with the life insurance money and forty years of savings that belonged to both of us, and I found a silver sedan gleaming quietly under the showroom lights. The salesman named Paul explained every feature with patience.
The price was eighty-five hundred dollars. I signed the papers that afternoon. Edith Miller, sole owner.
When I drove home, I cried. Joy and grief arriving together the way they always seem to at the moments that matter most. But driving through the afternoon sun I could feel his approval in some wordless way.
I parked in the driveway and sat looking at the car for a long time. It was mine. It was beautiful.
It was the first thing I had done entirely for myself in years. I called Matthew to tell him. He did not answer.
I left a voicemail. I told him I had bought a new car. That I was excited.
That I hoped he would come see it. That I loved him. I did not know that the next morning he would come and take it from me.
My son arrived with his wife Vanessa before I had finished my second cup of coffee. He did not come to see the car. He came with a decision already made and a face that belonged to a stranger.
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