All through the visitation she found herself drifting back to his side and her friends would part, pulling away a respectful distance, giving her time with her husband alone, or as alone as one could be in a room squeezed tight with seemingly everyone who’d ever had a passing acquaintance with David Masters. What a shock, they all said. What a loss.
But all Mary Ann could think of was, How did they do it? How did they make his body seem so substantial, so untouched? Her hand reached out, slid over his chest, coming to rest on the fine cotton-linen shirt she’d bought him just the week before. A finger probed the gap between two buttons. The familiar fur on his chest. The smooth, cool skin.
Mary Ann’s friends were alarmed when she immediately put the house up for sale. They tried to talk her out of it, suggested grief counselling. But within a month a sold sticker sloped across the real estate sign, and not long afterwards, early one sunny Saturday in June, the front lawn disappeared under a spread of furniture and linens, pots and pans and knick-knacks, a rack of David’s shirts and suits, his old golf clubs, the stationary bicycle and weightlifting bench, his skis and snowshoes and titanium touring bike. “Everything must go!!” the posters declared, the extra exclamation mark adding a sense of urgency, of exuberance.
Mary Ann made lemonade and had beer in coolers for David’s friends, his running buddies and golf foursome, the colleagues from work who shared a van and motel room on their annual trip to Saratoga to play the ponies. She saw them watching her as she moved among the browsers and gawkers. She was still slender, just forty-two, her legs long and tanned, hips slim, a body unmarked by childbirth. She kept her hair blond and boyishly cut. From a distance, she knew she could pass for twenty-one. But she wasn’t interested. She met the men’s soft gazes with a firm and steady smile.
Take them, please, she said of the cufflinks, the leather gloves, the investment analysis books. I’d rather they went to you than to a stranger or to the dump.
Not long after the yard sale, a new, cream-coloured Westfalia appeared in the driveway. On the day she signed over the house, Mary Ann climbed into the driver’s seat. All her worldly possessions were neatly stowed in the narrow cupboards and overhead bins at her back. She’d kept only one thing of David’s: the black-and-red striped cycling shirt he was wearing the morning he died, its synthetic fibres still so pungent with his sweat that when she lifted it to her nostrils, she felt faint with the sensation that he was there in her arms. She held the shirt to her face, breathing him in. Then she folded it carefully and slipped it into a Ziploc bag, sealing it shut and propping it up on the passenger seat.
She turned the key in the ignition and stepped on the accelerator, backing out of the driveway one last time. Clipped to the dashboard was a map. Seven places were circled, a thick pink line drawn from where she was now to a city in the east.
It took her a month to reach the first address. She’d taken her time. She found that she liked the driving, which surprised her, as so many things did now. She had driven herself to work at the post office for years, but it always seemed a chore, one of the necessary evils required to earn a paycheque. She was always grateful when, on their evenings out, David headed for the driver’s side of their small and sensible car. But the Westie was different. She loved being at the wheel, sitting up straight, high off the road, like the truckers who swept past her on the freeway, leaving her breathless and exhilarated in the turbulent backwash of their passing. She’d blink her lights twice to signal the all-clear, and they’d dip theirs, too, or sound the air horn, and she’d wave, wondering what she looked like, framed in the oblong of their rear-view mirrors. Like a wife? A widow? An adventuress?
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