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they had sat on the floor with a blanket and felt like they’d been given, instead of a nuisance, a melody. How that had been what he’d given her all their fifty-six years together, songs where they weren’t expected. She had stood at that carnation-wreathed podium and looked out at the rest of her life blankly: there was a question, surely, but couldn’t someone please repeat it?
    In the first months without him, Edith had marveled at how many different types of quiet there could be. What had been so different about the levels of noise with him sitting in the chair, reading for hours in his drugstore glasses? Why did every shower, now, feel like such an exercise in fallacy, preparation for an event never coming, though this had always been a lone ritual?
    She had been a stunning woman, a pronounced presence; Declan had been there to remind her of this, and now he was gone. She needed it to be communicated permanently in some way, so she could take full ownership of this new body, covered in layers of sweaters, these feet in their padded shoes.
    “Aging gracefully” was a model much talked about, though Edith doubted anyone ever felt elegant or nimble amid the nearly inescapable fatigue, the persistent mutations of once-simple tasks and the shame thereafter. When the time came to collate all the rent checks and utility bills, she put the task off for hours, then days, dreading what an ordeal adding and dividing had become, the way she would sometimes face off with a column of numbers and realize they meant as much to her as someone else’s mementos. She would wipe her face and begin again, reading each figure out loud, entreating it to stay in the room.

T HE KID ALWAYS SA ID HELLO . Never just a cursory nod. Had insisted on learning Edward’s name when he moved in, not to mention his favorite flower and fruit. “Is there a nickname you like?” Paulie had asked. He preferred those ending in
y
. “Eddy?” he suggested. Edward’s head that day had been thick and jumbled: he couldn’t summon the energy to reject the suggestion, and from then on it was always “Hiya, Eddy!”
    For a while the kid was practically Edward’s least favorite thing about living, and he timed his entrances and exits to avoid him. But even if he made his ascent during the kid’s violent assault on his stand-up Casio, Paulie would hear him and be sure to pop his head out: “Hello, my friend! What does the weather say today?” Edward made eye contact when guilt tugged at him enough—who was he to crush such benevolence, he wondered—but mostly kept the shade of his hat on his face, and the line of his sight on the unclean carpet. He knew from his own nocturnal schedule that Paulie also kept late hours, though for the kid they were celebratory, active, while Edward just prayed for sleep. Music always: singing, sometimes words but just as often not, sounds like a gang of monkeys bickering. Edward stopped crossing the hall to ask that Paulie turn himself down in order to avoid his neighbor’s repeated reflection that Edward looked sad. He bought noise-canceling headphones and played recordings of rainstorms across the world. Austin. Bangkok. The Amazon. Paulie was crazy for offering people tea; Edward had overheard him selling it to the other tenants. Chamomile Lemon English Breakfast Green Ginger! Always in the same order. The kid’s brain was broken, but Edward couldn’t of course recommend the health of his own. Paulie, it was clear, chased and cornered happiness daily.
    Edward was asleep when it happened, and the cry came into his dreams as the voice of his brother. His unconscious re-created the familiar childhood scene of Zachary asleep and whimpering in the next room, victim to the awful stories their parents fed them, nightmaring of kidnapping plots and elaborate suicides. (He, too, had called him Eddy.) Edward, then, had felt useful and important when he went to him, as well-appointed and comforting as a chair by an open