I thanked Dewey and said I would love to see him, I needed all the friends I could get, and asked him to call me next week. He promised he would, we said our goodbyes, and I hung up and turned to face Tina, both of us calm.

“Dewey?” Tina said, aloud this time. “As in Huey, Louie and?”

“He’s a friend from way back,” I said.

“How far back?”

“Before Gabe.”

“And now he thinks the coast is clear?”

“There’s nothing romantic about it,” I said. “I haven’t seen him since Gabe and I were married. Now give me a hug, shut up for five minutes, and I’ll tell you about him. If you’re interested.”

Tina lowered her head, looked at me with a smirk, and said she was interested in any man who had known me for years, who wasn’t a gnome, and who had never parked his shoes under my bed. Then she opened her arms and we hugged and patted each other’s back. What would I do without the little snip?

I explained that I had met Dewey while I was working at the veterinarian’s. His business name, Dewey Does Dogs, was the least attractive thing about him. All day long, while he washed and clipped and manicured hairy little creatures, his stereo belted out Mozart and Beethoven or Renée Fleming and Maria Callas. At the end of the day, when the dog owners had rescued their little sweetums and paid Dewey, he pocketed a couple of hundred dollars and smelled like a cocker spaniel.

“That’s two things I can imagine you not liking about him,” Tina said. “His name and his aroma.”

“There’s more,” I said. “He’s bisexual.”

“I hear it doubles your chances of getting a date on Saturday night.”

“What,” I said, “were we talking about before we started fighting?” I didn’t want to talk about Dewey. I wanted only to think about Gabe. I wanted to wallow in the memories of him. And I wanted Tina’s shoulder to cry on when I needed it.

“We were talking about your finances,” she said. “Unless you’ve got a big stash of money hidden away somewhere, or Gabe qualifies for a bank president’s pension … I mean, what are you going to live on? You’ll need to get a real job.”

“A real job?” She might have said I needed to buy a camel.

“Do you have any savings?”

“Like I said, the house is paid for. I guess there’ll be pension money …”

“So, what are you going to do, even if there is? Sit here the rest of your life, looking out at the lake?”

It was a classic big sister question. One I hadn’t thought of. Now that Tina had spoken it aloud, I chose to answer it aloud, and I answered it with the reply I had kept hidden since talking with Mel that morning. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think I will. I think I’ll sit here and stare at the lake, and when I get tired of doing that, I’ll look for whoever killed Gabe. I’ll look for the rest of my life, if I have to.”

10.

Tina left two days later, catching an afternoon flight to Vancouver. She rushed through breakfast and sat in the living room, looking beyond Beach Boulevard through the arches of the highway bridge toward the bay and the steel factories, waiting for her limo to arrive.

“Here’s Alex,” she said, standing up. Her luggage was at the front door.

“You called the same limo driver?” I asked.

“He asked me to. He’s lonely.”

I looked out the window. Alex was lumbering toward our front door, straightening his tie and beginning to suck in his stomach, which promised to be an extended journey. “He’s horny, Tina.”

“Being lonely and being horny are the same thing with men.” Tina leaned to look at herself in the hall mirror, smoothing her hair. Then she hugged me, and another Tina, the concerned sister, spoke in the concerned sister’s voice. “I hope I helped. I hope I wasn’t a problem.”

“You’re never a problem,” I said. “A pain in the ass sometimes, but never a problem.”

I kissed her on the cheek and looked over her shoulder to see Alex peering through the door window at us. “Your lonely driver’s here,” I said, and she turned and showed him Tina number three. This one smiled with wide eyes and squealed with an eight-year-old’s voice when she opened the door, “Alex, you’re so good. Here they are,” pointing at her honey-coloured luggage. She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got three hours before my flight, so we can drive slow and talk.”

Alex showed a series of gapped teeth and touched the brim of his cap.

“You two go straight to the airport,” I called from the door as Alex carried Tina’s luggage to the limo. “And don’t forget—”

I stopped at the sight of a small, shiny black van stopping in front of the house. In place of windows it had a silver hinge-like affair, as though the top could fold back like a baby carriage. A grey-haired man emerged from behind the wheel. He carried a plain metal box in one hand and a clipboard in the other. While Tina, Alex, and I watched, he glanced down at the sheet of paper on the clipboard, up at the house again, nodded to Tina and Alex—I almost thought of them as a couple—and walked toward me.

“Mrs. Marshall?” He had a voice acquired by older men of a certain stripe, as though they had been smoothing their vocal cords with paste wax for forty years.

“Yes,” I said.

He handed me the clipboard and a pen. “May I ask you to sign here, please?”

I signed the bottom of the sheet of paper and handed it to him. He thanked me, bowed his head, and with two hands gave me the box, which was about the size and weight of three pounds of coffee. Then he bowed again, took three steps backward, and returned to his shiny black car.

Tina walked toward me, concerned. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the box in my hand.

“This,” I said, and I was so glad I did not begin to cry, not there, not then. “This is Gabe.” Then I turned before Tina could hug me and closed the door, waving through the glass at her and nodding when she blew me a kiss.

THEY COULD HAVE PUT GABE’S ASHES in a china urn “suitable for placing on a mantle or in a display case,” the young undertaker had told me. He had shown me a sample: deep blue, with small white flowers at its base and white birds soaring near the rim. It cost seventy-five dollars and qualified as a piece of china because that’s where it was made, which meant it was probably worth eight-five cents when it was crated on a ship out of Shanghai.

I wasn’t being cheap when I said the metal box would be fine. I didn’t want Gabe on a mantel, which I don’t have anyway. I wanted Gabe in my bed. I wanted him holding my hand while we strolled the beach strip. I wanted him inside me on winter nights when we could hear the lake water crashing against ice-coated rocks along the pier.

Tina was gone and Gabe was in a small metal box, and neither event was making me happy, so I poured myself some brandy neat and drank it while staring at the metal case. I had a little cry, poured myself more brandy, and drank it too. Then I curled up on the sofa and slept, waking when the telephone rang. I refused to get up and answer it until it rang four times. Telemarketers never wait longer than that. Sisters do.

“I’m at the airport,” Tina said, a little breathlessly, I thought. “I’m taking a later flight, got a couple of hours to kill. Listen, I’m worried about you. I wish you would come and stay with me and Andrew.”

“We’ll see.”

“What are you going to do with … you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“That package the man in the black car delivered.”

“Gabe’s ashes? I’m going to look after that tonight.”

“What do you mean, look after it?”

“I’m going to deal with it. Do what is right. Do what I want to do, which I know is not always the same thing, but I’ve made up my mind.”

“Josephine, you have to tell me.”

“No, I don’t.”