The Hunger Moon by Suzanne Matson

shore excursions and to dance with him in the Cabaret Room. She refused these invitations, as well as the inappropriately expensive bracelet he tried to give her as a farewell gift before they docked, but did take from him his business card, which she stared at absently when she unpacked back in Belmont, putting it on her dresser, where it remained for a year.
    After the cruise, Eleanor seemed outwardly like her old self, just as, years before, after the brisk spring cleaning one could see no traces of mourning for the miscarried baby. She was efficient this way, giving herself some activity to purge the affliction of sadness, and then putting the cause of the sadness behind her. But a marriage of more than four decades was not to be so easily put aside. At first, everything Eleanor did was tinged with Robert’spresence. Reading the newspaper in the morning reminded her of the way he would read interesting bits to her without looking up, and how he could not start his day until he had digested the contents of the Times , the Globe , and the Journal . She began reading the paper at night over her supper, something neither of them had done. When the car needed an oil change, she let the maintenance light stay on for six weeks before she finally drove to a service station—Robert had always made this his job. His favorite devil’s food cookies remained on the cupboard shelves for months before she was able to throw them away, and she finally had Peter come down and take what clothes he wanted of his father’s before bundling the rest up for the Salvation Army just short of the first anniversary of his death.
    She tried to remember what daydreams she occasionally had had about things she would do if she lived alone. They turned out to be less satisfying in practice than in fantasy. She took a drawing class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and went to only half the sessions, having filled a sketchbook with ten pages of lumpy, unpromising life studies. For several months she ate the kind of spicy takeout she enjoyed, and which had given Robert indigestion, until she tired of the flavors and went back to broiling plain chicken and fish at home. She bought herself a cat, an animal Robert had been violently allergic to, and found that for the most part the creature and she ignored each other, though it was nice to have it sleeping warm at the foot of her bed at night.
    She had resented very little in marriage, and found herself missing much. Things that had irritated her about her husband—how he never put a single thing back that he had used, for instance, as if he thought a surgical scrub nurse was standing by to receive and dispose of anything he was finished with—now seemed insignificant next to the loss of his jokes, his conversation, and his faintly soapy smell.
    These things occupied Eleanor’s mind after June’s earnest inquiry, and yet there was nothing to say in reply to the girl. Thequestion, after all, was absurd. Grief was an intangible companion that moved in quietly after a death and came and went according to its own schedule. One day it seemed to leave for good, without letting you know its plans. Then came moments when you couldn’t clearly picture the face of your own husband, and you actually had to look at photographs to remind yourself of that other life you led. As she stared at the busy activity at her feeder in the mornings, Eleanor often felt a bewilderment. How had she gotten here? One day she was dipping Easter eggs with Isabel in a great sun-filled kitchen, her mother and nurse looking on. The next she was driving her three school-aged children to the pond, the car filled with black rubber inner tubes baking in the backseat. Now Eleanor had a silent white room to live in, as plain and empty as a box, and she drifted asleep in it, loose on some great tide she neither welcomed nor feared.

J UNE WAS WORKING ON TURNING HER AURA pink again, on the advice of Miriam Lightcap, psychic