The morning light filled my small Nashville apartment by degrees, the way it always did, slowly, as if the sun too had decided to take things easy at its age. I brewed tea instead of coffee. My heart had not been right these days, and seventy-five years old is no joke about these things.
My name is Ambrose Quinnel. It sounds almost like the name of a British aristocrat, but there was nothing aristocratic about me except my posture, and that came from decades of discipline rather than breeding. Three years had passed since Edith left me.
Cancer took her quickly, almost mercifully if such a word can be applied to the inevitable. We had been together forty-seven years, and then, in the space of three weeks between diagnosis and the end, there was nothing. The apartment where I lived now was too small for two people but exactly right for a lonely old man.
One bedroom, a living room with a kitchen, and a balcony with a single chair where I sat most evenings watching the Nashville sky fade behind the rooftops. On the mantelpiece sat Edith’s porcelain shepherdess. The walls held our wedding photograph, Tristan’s first day of school, a fishing afternoon on Lake Cumberland, and a vacation in the Smokies before retirement.
I tried not to look at them directly. The angle of too many memories. Tristan visited once a month, usually Sundays, with his wife Persephone.
An unusual name for a woman from Tennessee, but her parents had been devoted to Greek mythology. Sometimes I thought it suited her more than they had intended. They had two grandchildren I rarely saw.
There was always a reason, and I did not press. Children should grow up among other children, not spend their weekends with a man who still remembered when televisions were black-and-white. Each visit followed the same rhythm.
They arrived at noon with groceries as if I could no longer walk to the corner store. Persephone noted the dust on my bookshelves. Tristan asked about my health with the expression of a man expecting bad news.
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