The First Morning
The stove is clean in a way it has not been on a weekday in nineteen years. That is the first thing you notice, not the silence, but the wrongness of a clean stove at seven in the morning. You open the refrigerator out of habit and find yesterday's leftovers exactly where you left them, untouched, not moved to a smaller container, not covered with a plate the way she always did. The refrigerator smells like itself now. It used to smell like her decisions.
