It was May. There was still plenty of chill in the air, but it was the first day of May nonetheless. The pool was finished; it had been filled (Winnie had imagined a more complex process than her own garden hose, but apparently not) and was tamped down under a thick brown tarp. The bright blue-and-white hand-rail lined the ramp that led carefully down to the unseen water. There was still only dirt in the grounds surrounding the pale stone deck, but plantings could be put in as soon as it grew warm enough.

Winnie slowly walked around the circumference of her pool, stooping every once in a while to pick up an errant scrap of twine or plastic wrap. She stopped to listen; the Meyers twins were home now from the hospital, and every once in a while a baby’s squalls reached her, even this far, blown on the wind from three doors down. Without the sycamore tree, she’d noticed that sound carried fast and clear across their corner of this Hartfield neighborhood, which made her wonder whether the Greenbergs or the Meyers ever heard her own choked weeping, which she tried to do outside whenever possible, away from Jerry’s room, away from the nurses. But Winnie wasn’t weeping now.

She thought about the new babies on their street. Rachel as a newborn had cried and cried, endless hours each evening, and Winnie—who had supposed herself, after Danny’s easy babyhood, a fairly competent mother—was rattled, having deployed all her usual soothing and bouncing tricks to no avail. George had been working late then, almost every night, so Winnie was left alone with her sleeping son and her wild, thrashing, new daughter who arched her back and screamed when held, pausing only long enough for another deep, shuddering intake of breath. Winnie remembered how she simply gave up one evening, wrapping Rachel in a blanket and placing her next to her on the couch, crying still, while she herself read Peyton Place. Surprisingly enough, she managed to enjoy quite a bit of that trashy book. She would turn a page, and then reach over to pat her daughter. They each had their work to do, it seemed.

Nothing drastic happened to make it stop; there was no new trick she had found that soothed Rachel, and after a few weeks (weeks that lasted an eternity), the crying just phased itself out. It was time that took care of it, the way all the old-hand mothers and aunts had told her then. Winnie shook her head, there on the front lawn. Easy enough for her to say, now—for them to say, then. There were times she’d been in complete despair, walking a baby endless paces through the nighttime rooms. She should tell Rita Meyers this story, she thought, slip it in as a possibly unrelated anecdote, just in case it could help. She would bring some brownies over, later in the afternoon, and tell her about Rachel. Sometimes just a story can help.

Winnie squinted up at her house. She saw missing tiles high up on one of the gabled roofs, near a small, pipe-like chimney, and she saw a spreading stain like a shadow above one of the windows—a bathroom on the second floor, she thought, but couldn’t be sure. She noticed windows from rooms that she and Jerry had never used. The house was more closed up than not, Winnie understood for the first time. After another long look around the spring-wet lawn and the covered pool, she walked briskly back to the side door, near the kitchen entrance.

It was now May. There was no pretending otherwise. Though Winnie had long ago stopped marking checks or stars in that old calendar book—because all the days were now the same—she had made her own mental deadline, a date that had now come.

Upstairs, she took off her damp shoes before going in to Jerry. He was in bed as usual, eyes closed and mouth covered by the mask connected to the breathing machine. The nurse looked up from his magazine when she came in, and slipped from the room when she gave a brief nod.

She only needed a moment, to do what needed to be done. Winnie crawled carefully into bed with Jerry and lay there with him, on her side, with her head on his same pillow. The creases of his skin fell in soft folds along his sunken cheeks. She slid a finger under the elastic band holding the mask to his mouth to touch his face gently. She picked up his heavy hand and laced her fingers through his unmoving ones. A puff of fresh air blew in above them, from the open window. Winnie could hear teenagers shouting as they shot skateboards down Franklin’s steep hill.

She closed her eyes and breathed him in. She told him what she needed to, there on the bed, without any words at all.

In the hall, her eyes were dry. The nurse had a questioning, concerned look on his wide black face, but she ignored it and told him that she had set aside the Sunday crossword puzzle for him, as she’d noticed he enjoyed those.

Down in the kitchen, she dialed Annette’s home number. Following the plan she and Rich had put together over the past few weeks, he answered right away. They spoke little—I’ll get her, he said quietly.

“Yes?” Annette, suspicious, wary.

“I want to move Jerry back to Chicago. Back to you,” Winnie said. It wasn’t as hard as she’d thought, saying the words aloud, though they still made her heart pitch.

“What do you mean? What is this about?”

“Rich and I have discussed the particulars. There’s a service for this—a medical jet, with everything he will need. And the doctors already know about it, so they can help arrange it all.”

There was silence on the other end. Winnie put her hand flat on the kitchen table, clear for once of insurance paperwork, which she had finished organizing into folders, each neatly labeled, late last night. Everything was packed into clear plastic bins. They would go with Jerry.

“Dr. Rosen wants to wait until early next week. There is a little fluid near his lungs, but the new drugs should take care of that soon. And anyway, you’ll need some time to get a room set up there. I can tell you about the bed to order, the other things you’ll need.” Still nothing from Annette. “Do you hear what I’m saying?” Winnie asked, letting loose a shot of impatience.

“I don’t understand,” Annette said finally. “Why? Why now? Has something happened?”

Winnie chose to answer the last question. “Nothing’s happened. There’s still no change in his catatonia, only that the longer it lasts…” She stopped, changed course. “They don’t agree on how long he has. As I told you—or Rich, rather—one resident told me weeks—” Was that a muffled sob from Annette? Winnie went on. “But Dr. Rosen said it could be months, longer even. Maybe through the summer.”

Summer. That word hurt. It kicked her hard, in the chest, in the stomach. Winnie put the phone in her lap and weathered the blow. She clamped down on thoughts of last summer, of those hot evenings here in the house, tiptoeing from room to room with Jerry’s hand in hers. She wouldn’t think about the pool that awaited him, outside in the lawn.

When she picked up the phone again, Annette was sputtering. “—finally come to your senses when he should have been here a long time ago, when he never should have—”

“I don’t want to argue with you, Annette. He’s coming home. What more do you want?”

There was a short pause. “Well, I could ask you the same thing. What more do you want?”

“What?”

“Is this some kind of strategy on your part, this sudden reversal? You’re trying to throw me off balance—is that it? I know you’re not pretending we’re about to go to court—in fact, this should all be discussed through the lawyers.”

Winnie looked at the ceiling and shook her head. She bit off the urge to hang up the phone. What stopped her: this was Jerry’s own child, his only child. Nor did she point out the contradictions in Annette’s behavior—after all, it hadn’t been lawyers calling every few days for these many weeks; it had been Annette herself, alternately threatening and pleading. Sometimes Winnie tried to talk to her, but more often she just stood immobilized in the dark hallway, listening to the torrent of words unleashed into their answering machine. It occurred to Winnie that what drove Annette was a recognition of her own ugliness, this cruel lawsuit that had brought Jerry so much pain, and that the note of panic in the other woman’s voice meant that she’d realized her own chance of making it up to him was fast slipping away. But that didn’t make these rage-filled diatribes any easier to take.

Once, Bob had overheard. He was there at the house, taking out some storm screens, and after a minute or two of Annette’s voice into the machine, Winnie lost it—she yanked the cord out of the wall, cutting off the sound altogether. There must have been anger in her face, because after a minute her son-in-law spoke. He said what he had to say quietly but straight out: “She has a right to want her father back, Winnie.”

So those calls had done their work, after all; it had tunneled into her, all that pain and anguish. Not that she didn’t have her own. But Winnie, alone with a failing husband, got to thinking about Harold Easton, about those long weeks in the hospital at the end of her father’s life. She had been with him while he died, and as grim as the experience had been, she understood now in a way she couldn’t have then, the natural order of things, a child burying her parent. Maybe it was more Annette’s right than her own, to be with Jerry at the end.

Though it wasn’t just Annette that had led Winnie here, to the decision to give him up. Annette may have been where it started, but Winnie had traveled a long way in these past weeks, while Jerry lay still and silent, the only sound from his room a nurse’s movement or the hum of his oxygen machine. With so much time, and so little to do, Winnie had spent most of it at his side, thinking about the life of the man she had known for such a short time. His whole life, that is. What did she know of it?

Images of Jerry as a young boy, scrapping with Frank and driving their mother to distraction—Winnie had devised most of these from a few stories he’d told. What had he been like as a schoolboy, as an army recruit, as a new father? She held up bits and pieces of his past, examined them minutely. The oxygen machine whispered; a nurse came in with fresh bedsheets. Sometimes, in those submerged hours, what little she knew would get mixed up with Winnie’s own memories. She would doze off, smiling at the time Jerry, as a bachelor, misread the amount of soap flakes required, and flooded the laundry room with inches of foamy lather…only to wake up with a start—his IV fluids were being adjusted—and realize that it had been George who’d had that washing-machine mishap, in their own house, one weekend she’d been out of town, when the children were young.

It took time, but as winter shaded into early spring, Winnie was able to face without flinching how little she knew about the man she had married. Confined to this small upstairs room, Winnie’s line of sight expanded. Her heart widened, painfully so at first, but she got used it. Our marriage is like a station stop, she thought once, resting her elbows on the bed and her forehead against his unmoving shoulder. An essential station stop, to be sure, and much loved—her eyes filled at this—but not the final destination, or the train itself, or a rail route’s long stretch of miles.

There were things, though, about Jerry that Winnie knew and no one else could: that the soft white tuft of hair in the middle of his chest was the exact size of her hand. That he regularly dreamed about a pregnant cocktail waitress he’d met once, in a North Carolina bar, the night before he’d shipped out to Korea. The tender, thorough way he kissed; the way he took a hot shower both before and after making love; his surprisingly small bare feet.

She knew this: one night, last fall, when he rose from her bed and got hit with such pain in his back that he couldn’t help crying out, he had to sit down again. Eventually, Winnie had to help; it took many tries to get him upright again, unsteady and shaking, face pale.

“Son of a bitch,” Jerry had said then, turning to where she was kneeling, naked and worried, on the bed. “But it’s all worth it, looking at you.”

For days, Winnie held them close: what she knew of Jerry, and what she didn’t. What she had of him, what she never would. Something shifted inside her, and Winnie recognized what she could do, what she wanted to do: let Jerry go back to his daughter. Let him go.

After that, talking to Rich and making all the plans had been simple. She set her May 1 deadline; if there was still no change, she would tell Annette, and they would go through with it. It didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would, either. After all, losing Jerry had already happened. She had suffered that, and it was done.

Very little of this could be explained, though, to Annette. And though she was about to hang up on the woman, what stopped Winnie was an image of Rachel. Brave, loyal, maddening Rachel. Stumbling through her own life and always still in Winnie’s, always there. The person that Winnie would need to have by her side when her own death came. The thought of Rachel gave her a surge of energy, and an idea came to her.

“Actually, there is something I want,” she said in response to Annette. “Not any part of Jerry’s estate, though. And your son doesn’t, either. He’s a good boy—a man, I mean. Jerry never signed the paperwork to change his will. I think his lawyer knows that, but I’ll make sure of it. He didn’t mean to hurt you. He was just angry. Let that go, now, Annette.”

Silence.

Winnie straightened her back. “I want this house. He bought it for us, you know he did. On this, I won’t back down.” She heard herself—she heard Jerry—and smiled a little.

“You don’t mean you’re actually proposing…to trade my father for that property?”

“Call it what you want. Those are the terms.” Winnie considered her own words, this alien tone, and was grimly pleased. She felt light, free. She had a sudden understanding of business and its appeal—you drew a line in the sand and then waited. And what she was betting on was that the lawsuit over the house meant nothing to Annette anymore, now that Jerry was dying. Now that he was coming back to Chicago.

“I don’t understand you at all, Mrs. McClelland.”

“Trevis,” Winnie corrected.

And when the pause that followed grew and lengthened, she knew she had won. No doubt Annette would argue and chastise and bluff. No doubt there would be fuss and bother with the lawyers, but at its heart Winnie knew that the deal being struck was sound and true, and she guessed that even Annette could see it, too. Several weeks ago, Ed Weller had described some paper victory claimed in that nonsense about Jerry’s mental competence, and told her that the suit was all but worthless; the house was hers. Hers and Jerry’s. In the throes of his decline, Winnie had hardly cared, but she did now. She would honor this house, the one they had lived in and loved in, and she would try her best to help Rachel, whose need and envy were real. They were real, these feelings of her daughter’s. Winnie had pushed them to the side, had discounted them in her haste to be with Jerry, but she wouldn’t do that anymore.

So she had won. She could hear it in Annette’s voice as they moved on to the tiresome discussion of when and where. Suddenly weak, Winnie ended the call as soon as she could.

But then she just sat there at the kitchen table, unable to move to the stove to make tea, unable to go find a more comfortable place to sit or lie down. She was paralyzed by a host of buzzing, needling thoughts, and she felt the roar of a distant panic bearing down on her, alone. The square-sided glass saltshaker in front of her was nearly empty, and she closed her hand around it simply to have something to hold.

It took Winnie a moment to recognize the sound pinging in the front hall—it was the doorbell. She made herself get up and walk slowly through the halls to answer, to receive whatever delivery might have come. Her legs trembled; her body ached in a way that was strange and new, and Winnie lightly touched the walls as she passed them, looking for steadiness.

Vi Greenberg stood there in the doorway, in an oversized cotton sweater with big baggy pockets. She was gripping a glass casserole dish, and her mouth was set firmly. Not once had they spoken since that day last fall, before the tree was cut down. Every time Vi walked past or pulled in and out of her driveway, Winnie could tell that the other woman deliberately adjusted her gaze, pretending not to see her.

“Chicken a la king,” Vi said, holding out the dish. “Reheat it at three hundred fifty degrees for an hour. Little less, maybe.”

Winnie couldn’t help herself: the tears began to come fast. This one act of neighborly kindness was going to undo her. Vi’s pleasant but firm smile now wavered.

“I should have been over earlier,” she admitted. “We’ve wanted to, but…”

Winnie took the casserole and tried to wipe at her wet face with the back of her other hand. For a long time, she had wondered what she might say to Vi, if given the chance—to all those who stood by while she put that pool in the ground.

“Carbonfund dot org,” she said—it just came out. “I donate every month. You can offset your emissions—I looked up what the damage must be, the losses from that tree.”

Vi’s face was puzzled, but she waited for Winnie to continue.

“It doesn’t change things,” she said now to her neighbor, a woman near her own age, a grandmother so like herself. “I just wanted you to know—for a long time, I wanted to tell you—”

“Tell me what, Winifred?”

But now nothing came to mind. And the whole of it—Jerry upstairs, the sound of his breathing machine, and Annette’s voice on the phone, and Vi here now, after all the shamefulness between them—overwhelmed her, and Winnie could do nothing other than stand weeping in the open doorway with her neighbor, and hold the food she’d been given.