I opened the kitchen drawer, the one next to the drawer where Gabe kept the ammunition for his gun when he was home, pulled out a pencil, and looked for the notebook we always kept on the counter, the wire-bound book he had torn a page from and written I’m in the bushes. Get naked! It wasn’t there. Gabe and I wrote shopping lists and telephone numbers and messages to each other in the notebook. I had bought it at a drugstore. We could have used one of the police-issue pads, like others did, Gabe bringing home a couple at a time, but Gabe said no, that’s not what they were for. Using them for our personal use would be theft. So we paid two bucks for the same damn pad from a drugstore. That’s how honest Gabe was. That’s what my husband was like.

When I couldn’t find the pad on the counter, all the anger, guilt, and frustration from the evening before welled up in me again. I opened all the drawers, then turned to look on the kitchen table and in the cupboards where the dishes were kept, all the places I knew the pad would never be. I began shaking with rage and anxiety and something else. “I can’t find it,” I said to Mel. “I can’t find it, it’s not here.”

Mel asked what I was talking about, but I couldn’t say. I just hung up the telephone, walked to the rear door, and screamed, “Go to hell!” at everyone—the television reporter with the perfect hair and makeup, two guys with TV cameras, a photographer who took my picture over and over. Hans and Trudy, the German couple down the beach who were still building their oversized house to resemble a castle, complete with parapets, were walking their dog, and both they and the schnauzer stopped to look. They all saw the grieving widow at her worst.

I returned to the chair in the living room, where I curled into a ball and thought about Gabe, and how he wouldn’t even steal a two-dollar wire-bound pad from the police department, and fell asleep there.

I DID NOT DREAM FOR THE NEXT TWO HOURS. I woke to the ringing telephone, to people knocking on my door, to the sound of cars arriving and leaving in the lane next to the house. Each time the noise ceased, I slept again. No dreams. No organizing of thoughts. No dealing with facts I did not understand, like why my husband would carry a gun with him to a blanket in the bushes and wait for me there and, when I did not arrive, why he would shoot himself in the head.

Around ten, I walked to the bathroom and showered and combed my hair and put on some lipstick and cried a little more. I dressed, made coffee, and listened to my telephone messages. Two were from Mel. He was concerned, he was sorry, and he honestly wanted to do whatever he could for me. I believed him. In everything we had done, as wrong as it might have been, Mel had been gentle with me, and concerned about Gabe. Men can do that—sleep with another man’s wife and worry about the couple’s marriage. Mel had worried about Gabe. Had Mel been married, I would not have given a damn about his wife. Why should I? That’s a man’s job.

Three neighbours and an old friend, Dewey Maas, had called to say they had heard the news about Gabe and to express their sadness. Helen Detwiler from the retirement home passed along her condolences and told me not to worry about work because they would make other arrangements for as long as it took me to get over my loss, and that I might consider calling Mother as soon as I was able. Two radio stations and a local newspaper reporter wanted to talk to me.

I phoned Helen, was told she was in a staff meeting, and asked that she assure Mother that I was all right and I would visit her later in the day. Then I drank three cups of coffee and considered drinking a glass of whisky, just to gather nerve to call my sister, Tina.

NEITHER MY SISTER NOR I HAVE CHILDREN. Some people see this as a tragedy. I see it as evidence of genetic selection.

I was unable to have children, although I was informed that my problem, if that’s what you wish to call it, could be cured with a combination of drugs, surgery and petri dishes. When my first husband and I learned we could not be parents, everyone we knew suggested adoption. I replied that adopting a child was like buying a used car through the mail. The truth is, we weren’t devastated by the news, although my first husband, in one of our last fights before our divorce, accused me of lying about being unhappy that I could not bear his child. By that time he was at least half correct.

Tina, on the other hand, is almost abnormally fecund, which is a word that looks and sounds uglier than it should. The way Tina explained it, she could get knocked up by folding a man’s underwear. Tina got pregnant twice, with two consecutive boyfriends, before she was eighteen. She claimed she’d had sex with each of them only once. She aborted both, and the second time was so painful she decided never to go through childbirth. And she didn’t.

I sat with my hand on the telephone, knowing it was early in British Columbia and thinking perhaps I should wait until she was fully awake before calling her. As if she would hesitate to call me, I realized, and dialed her number.

She was awake, probably having made eggs Benedict for the neighbourhood after leading them in an hour of yoga. Tina lives in Kitsilano, a part of Vancouver that tries to pretend it’s Beverly Hills, just as Vancouver wishes it were Los Angeles. She lives there with her husband, a surgeon who inherited a reasonably sizable fortune from his father’s lumber investments. Andrew, Tina’s husband, had enough cash on hand to buy the southern half of Vancouver Island and dine on pheasant every day without lifting a finger, if he chose to. Instead, he married Tina, purchased a small mansion in Kitsilano, and spends his days cutting people open and examining their innards, and I have no idea why.

When I visited Tina and Andrew before marrying Gabe, Tina introduced me to her country club friends. They were so gracious and warm that by the third day I feared I would throw up on the next woman who gave me an air kiss before handing me a glass of Chardonnay. On the fourth day, I flagged a cab near the university and had the driver take me to East Hastings Street, the skid row of Vancouver. I sat in the cab, parked at the curb, for twenty minutes while I watched hookers stumble into alleyways to give twenty-dollar quickies, and guys with vomit on their sweatshirts wash windshields at stoplights, and druggies pick up their fixes, and people in tourist buses stare open-mouthed at the carnival freak show. Then I had the driver take me back to Kitsilano for canapés and pretension. The few minutes on the other side of town set me up for the rest of the week. Everything, my father used to say, needs to be rebalanced from time to time. My father was rarely wrong about anything.

Now, at the sound of my sister’s voice on the telephone, something terrible happened to me: I became my mother, unable to speak.

She said “Hello?” three or four times, growing angrier with each delivery, until I finally got the words past the lump in my throat. “It’s me,” I said.

“Who’s me?” Tina said. Then: “Josephine Olivia? Josephine?”

Some people hate their names. I don’t hate mine. I just think Josephine Olivia is perfect for somebody else. Anybody else. By the time I reached puberty, I insisted that everyone call me Josie. Not Josephine. Not ever. Tina would tease me about it, calling me Josephine and then saying “Oops!” as though she’d forgotten how much I disliked it. She said “Oops!” so often she began calling me Josephine Oops until I poured a can of turpentine in her underwear drawer and told her why. Her full name, by the way, is Christina Abigail. The second time I called her Abigail, she hit me on the head with a book.

“Gabe’s dead,” I managed to get out.

“Oh my god. How? At work?”