For ten minutes, I felt terrified.
Then I felt ridiculous for being terrified.
Then I felt hungry.
So I ate.
The next morning, I became lost looking for a museum and met a widow from Ohio named Carolyn who was also lost.
We spent the afternoon together.
She had lost her husband four years earlier.
She traveled twice a year.
“Does it ever stop feeling strange?” I asked.
“What?”
“Doing things without them.”
She considered this.
“No.”
My heart sank slightly.
Then she smiled.
“But strange stops meaning wrong.”
I wrote that sentence in Robert’s notebook.
Two weeks later, I returned home.
I missed my family.
I also wished I had booked three weeks.
Both facts made me strangely proud.
Summer came.
The Cape May house rented well.
Better than Ellen had predicted.
The first time strangers stayed there, I spent three days imagining them scratching furniture, ruining pans, and somehow destroying forty years of memories.
