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that railroad-car room, under an eave so steep I’d had to almost crouch so as not to bang my head when I got up (over the years I’d alsohad to withstand Jo’s protests that I’d picked the absolute worst place in the room for a workstation), the screen of my Macintosh glowed with words.
    I thought I was probably inviting another storm of grief—maybe the worst storm—but I went ahead anyway . . . and our emotions always surprise us, don’t they? There was no weeping and wailing that night; I guess all that was out of my system. Instead there was a deep and wretched sense of loss—the empty chair where she used to like to sit and read, the empty table where she would always set her glass too close to the edge.
    I poured a glass of champagne, let the foam settle, then picked it up. “I’m done, Jo,” I said as I sat there beneath the paddling fans. “So that’s all right, isn’t it?”
    There was no response. In light of all that came later, I think that’s worth repeating—there was no response. I didn’t sense, as I later did, that I was not alone in a room which appeared empty.
    I drank the champagne, put the glass back on the Coke tray, then filled the other one. I took it over to the Mac and sat down where Johanna would have been sitting, if not for everyone’s favorite loving God. No weeping and wailing, but my eyes prickled with tears. The words on the screen were these:
    today wasn’t so bad, she supposed. She crossed the grass to her car, and laughed when she saw the white square of paper under the windshield. Cam Delancey, who refused to be discouraged, or to take no for an answer, had invited her to anotherof his Thursday-night wine-tasting parties. She took the paper, started to tear it up, then changed her mind and stuck it in the hip pocket of her jeans, instead.
    â€œNo paragraph indent,” I said, “this continues.” Then I keyboarded the line I’d been holding in my head ever since I got up to get the champagne. There was a whole world out there; Cam Delancey’s wine-tasting was as good a place to start as any.
    I stopped, looking at the little flashing cursor. The tears were still prickling at the corners of my eyes, but I repeat that there were no cold drafts around my ankles, no spectral fingers at the nape of my neck. I hit RETURN twice. I clicked on CENTER . I typed The End below the last line of prose, and then I toasted the screen with what should have been Jo’s glass of champagne.
    â€œHere’s to you, babe,” I said. “I wish you were here. I miss you like hell.” My voice wavered a little on that last word, but didn’t break. I drank the Taittinger, saved my final line of copy, transferred the whole works to floppy disks, then backed them up. And except for notes, grocery lists, and checks, that was the last writing I did for four years.

CHAPTER
3
    M y publisher didn’t know, my editor Debra Weinstock didn’t know, my agent Harold Oblowski didn’t know. Frank Arlen didn’t know, either, although on more than one occasion I had been tempted to tell him. Let me be your brother. For Jo’s sake if not your own, he told me on the day he went back to his printing business and mostly solitary life in the southern Maine town of Sanford. I had never expected to take him up on that, and didn’t—not in the elemental cry-for-help way he might have been thinking about—but I phoned him every couple of weeks or so. Guy-talk, you know— How’s it going, Not too bad, cold as a witch’s tit, Yeah, here, too, You want to go down to Boston if I can get Bruins tickets, Maybe next year, pretty busy right now, Yeah, I know how that is, seeya, Mikey, Okay, Frank, keep your wee-wee in the teepee. Guy-talk.
    I’m pretty sure that once or twice he asked me if I was working on a new book, and I think I said—
    Oh, fuck it—that’s a