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to tell her about the cold that never went away, and about the days and days I would have to carry a handkerchief with me into court. I described my sore throat and I brought up my watery eyes. I told her my doctor didn't seem to be able to help me, and how at three in the morning I could vacillate wildly between the profound belief that I was a hypochondriac and the desperate fear that I was dying. At some point she started to write, and I watched her hand move across the pad in her lap as I spoke; I tried not to imagine which were the key words she was choosing to save.
    "You live with your little daughter, right? It's just the two of you?" she asked.
    "It is."
    "Are you involved with someone?"
    "No. I've had very few dates since my wife died," I said, emphasizing the word died. I never said "passed away" when I talked about Elizabeth's death. "Passed away" suggested disease and expiration, a death that took time. Elizabeth didn't die instantly, but she never regained consciousness in the few hours she lived after the accident.
    "How come?"
    "I don't know. I think it's mostly because I'm away from Abby--my four-year-old--five days a week from seven-thirty, quarter to eight in the morning until six or six-thirty at night. The idea of deserting her on top of that to go out to dinner or a movie seems a little unfair."
    "Selfish?"
    "I guess."
    "What else? What else keeps you from dating?"
    "Let's see, what else," I said as her voice echoed inside my head. I liked her voice, I liked it a lot. It was a competent voice, a fast voice--the sort of voice I always associated with the female prosecutors with whom I worked. And so I told her about a beautiful summer afternoon--not a cloud in the sky, not a drop of water or a wet leaf on the pavement--and what an accident reconstructionist would tell me later had occurred on a road by a river.
    Elizabeth had been running late for a two P.M. appointment with a young entrepreneur at the site (factory was too grandiose a word) where he was manufacturing disposable toothbrushes. The fellow had a loan from the Small Business Administration, and he wanted one from Elizabeth's bank as well. She was driving fast, but she was on her side of the two-lane state highway.
    The driver of the dairy delivery truck had been trying to get something from the glove compartment of his vehicle, reaching all the way across the front seat--stretching his arm into the drawer under the dashboard, craning his neck to see what his fingers were failing to find. He must have taken his eyes off the road just long enough to miss the fact that the road was curving to his right and he needed to turn the truck accordingly. He didn't, and thus plowed into the Subaru driven by the thirty-two-year-old loan officer for a Burlington bank, the front end of the truck slamming into the driver's side of the car at about forty-five miles an hour. Entangled, the two vehicles careened off the road, through the guardrail, and over the bank into the shallow waters of the Lamoille River.
    Much of the milk and cream and half-and-half poured out onto the riverbank and briefly turned a stretch of shore white. It was soon after the accident that I developed a distaste for dairy products and began drinking my coffee black.
    The driver of the truck, a twenty-three-year-old fellow from Enosburg Falls, died instantly, while Elizabeth hung on, unconscious, for close to four hours. She never opened her eyes or awoke while the rescue squad was cutting her from the car, or while they rushed her in the back of their ambulance to the hospital in Burlington. Had the fellow driving the dairy delivery truck been wearing a seat belt, he might have lived: He ended up underneath the crinkled metal sculpture that had once been a truck and a car.
    And though Elizabeth had been wearing a seat belt, it hadn't made any difference in her case. She had been impaled upon metal shards from the door by her side, gored through lung and spleen and the very back of her