Jack thanked them.
He knew they meant well.
But he did not find the statements particularly comforting.
He had not done everything.
There had been mornings when he was impatient, afternoons when he resented the illness, evenings when he wished for an hour in which nobody needed anything from him.
There had been times when he longed for his old life so intensely that he felt disloyal to the woman sitting in front of him.
He had loved May.
He had also been exhausted by caring for her.
Both things were true.
After the reception, Helen drove him home.
The cottage was warm.
Ruth had made sure the heating was on, though she no longer needed to visit.
The kitchen calendar still hung beside the pantry door.
Jack stood in front of it.
There were no more appointments for May.
Helen watched him.
“Dad, would you like me to stay tonight?”
He shook his head.
“I think I’d like a bit of quiet.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated.
Then she embraced him.
He held her for a long time.
“Ring me if you need anything,” she said.
“I will.”
“And eat something.”
He almost smiled.
“You sound like your mother.”
Helen wiped her eyes.
“Someone has to.”
After she left, Jack sat at the kitchen table.
The house was very quiet.
For years, he had complained about the ticking of the clock above the doorway. May insisted that it was perfectly normal for a clock to tick and that he ought to stop listening for it.
Now he heard every movement of the mechanism.
He made himself a sandwich.
He ate half.
Then he put the remaining half in the refrigerator.
He noticed the china cups on the shelf.
Eighteen of them.
Still far too many for one person.
He stood and took down two.
One was plain white.
The other had a small blue flower painted near the handle.
May’s favourite.
He filled the kettle.
When the water boiled, he warmed both cups.
He measured the tea leaves and poured the water.
Then he set the cups on the table.
For the first time in many years, he did not need to consider whether May would recognise him when he entered the room.
There would be no careful introduction.
No polite greeting.
No question about whether he had come to repair something.
No voice asking how he took his tea.
Jack sat down.
He looked at the empty chair opposite him.
The last four years had been filled with people telling him that although May could no longer remember him, their love remained.
He understood what they meant.
But they had rarely spoken about the loneliness of being the only person left who remembered the private details of a marriage.
Helen knew her parents had been happy together.
She knew they argued and made up.
She knew her mother had been stubborn and her father dependable.
But she did not remember the first time May held Jack’s hand under a table because he was nervous about meeting her father.
She did not remember the evening they bought the cottage or the argument they had over the colour of the sitting-room wallpaper.
She did not remember the jokes they had stopped telling other people because nobody else found them funny.
Those memories belonged to two people.
Now they belonged to one.
Jack lifted his cup.
The tea was slightly too strong.
May would have complained.
He smiled.
Then, quite unexpectedly, he began to cry.
Not because he had discovered some new understanding of grief.
Not because the house had suddenly become empty.
It had been becoming empty for years.
He cried because, after spending so long introducing himself to his wife, he had finally reached a morning when there was nobody left to introduce himself to.
He set down the cup before spilling it.
He cried for several minutes, sitting at the same table where May had once accused him of hiding her scissors.
When he was finished, he wiped his face, blew his nose, and drank the rest of his tea.
It had gone cold.
He drank it anyway.
In the months after May’s funeral, Jack had to learn how to live in the cottage without organising every hour around her care.
Helen visited regularly.
He joined an informal walking group for older residents, though he complained that they spent more time discussing the weather than walking.
He returned to working in the garden.
He repaired the wall again.
Ruth stopped by occasionally for tea, no longer as a care worker but as someone who had come to know both of them well.
She asked about the roses.
Jack told her they were doing badly.
She inspected them and announced that he had been pruning them incorrectly.
He was delighted.
“May used to say exactly that.”
Ruth laughed.
“I suspect she was right.”
“Frequently. It was very inconvenient.”
On May’s birthday, Helen brought Sophie and Ben to the cottage.
They spent the afternoon looking through photograph albums.
There were pictures of May as a young teacher, May holding Helen as a baby, May standing on a beach in Scarborough with her hair blowing across her face.
Sophie stopped at a photograph taken during a family holiday in the Lake District.
May was sitting on a rock beside a stream, laughing.
Jack stood behind her holding a picnic basket.
“What was Grandma laughing at?”
Jack leaned closer.
“Your mother had dropped a sandwich in the water.”
Helen frowned.
“I don’t remember that.”
“You were eight.”
