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finally asks, snapping Jill back to the present.
    Jill moves her eyes back to the horizon, where they belong, she knows, but looking there, toward what is to come, is now sometimes frightening. Too much has happened. So much loss. All the empty hours.
    “I don’t know about this traveling funeral she planned, perhaps one of the boys knows, but my guess, knowing Annie the way I do, is that no one knew and that you, lucky you, Katherine, were the first to know.”
    “You were so close to her though.”
    A swell of grief rises from Jill’s stomach and passes directly through her heart. It is a fast wave that catches her off-guard and changes how she speaks and thinks and moves and talks.
    “Oh God . . .”
    “Jill,” Katherine whispers. “We all loved her so goddamn much. I don’t really know you but I am certain of that. Are you okay?”
    Jill answers in short sentences. She tells Katherine, a woman she has never met but knows through stories and tales and clippings from newspapers and from the voice of her dead friend, that the loss of Annie has knocked her flat. She tells her about the days and nights following her recent retirement and how she struggles to see—after years of knowing—where all the pieces will now fit from day to day. She stops once or twice to gain control of her own voice. She stops again because she simply cannot speak. Then she admits to Katherine Givins and to herself: “I want right now to just lie down on this porch and not wake up for a very long time.”
    “Oh, sweetheart,” Katherine says. “Do you want me to drive up there?”
    Jill smiles again. She grabs the blanket off the wicker chair behind her, wraps it around her shoulders, and slides to the floor of the porch. Then she laughs.
    “Are you laughing?” Katherine asks, bewildered, and worried that she may indeed be crying.
    “Yes, and now I am lying on the porch floor all tangled up in a blanket.”
    “Should I come?” Katherine offers again, immediately worried.
    “You are already here, Katherine. It’s okay. I have to ride this until it’s just a whimper. I didn’t think about this happening. I wasn’t ready for all this change. In my wildest dreams, which were pretty damn tame—this right here—me lying on the porch and preparing for a traveling funeral, Annie’s death, the emptiness I feel now that my career has ended—it never felt quite real. I’m also terribly used to being alone, although alone without Annie won’t be the same. You will probably get heartily sick of me in the first three seconds on this funeral trip.”
    Katherine thinks for a moment about changes and chance. She thinks about loss and movement and how in a million years she could never have dreamed of this set of circumstances that has rocked her world in a new direction, and then she thinks about her mother.
    Katherine closes her eyes while Jill positions herself and asks her to please hang on, and in that dark spot, just behind her eyelids, Katherine seeks something sacred and true. She finds a memory that resurrects itself with just the simple closing of her eyes.
    This is that moment. This one moment just weeks before her mother’s death. Katherine was sitting in her mother’s room at the hospice center. There had been hours of silence as Katherine monitored the twitches in her mother’s face, the graceful way her mother’s hands remained folded on top of her chest, the fine lines that moved from the corner of her mother’s eyes to reach for her silver hairline, the way her mother turned to greet every single person who came into the room no matter how much pain she was experiencing, the way—even when the drugs had grabbed hold of her—that she tried to rise off her pillow to make certain that Katherine was still in the room with her, standing guard, protecting, making certain—as she always did—that everything was taken care of and that everyone was moving in the proper direction.
    Katherine moved her chair to the side of