Odd Hours

turn-signal lever, so that the Cadillac seemed to be waving at me.
    “Seventy-eight years old, still a hot flash now and then. But it’s not the slowest change of life in history. Been done with all that long ago. Has something to do with the twinges.”
    From the large purse that stood on the seat between us, Birdie withdrew a Japanese fan, unfolded it, and fanned her plump face.
    “Fred died, it started.”
    “Seven years ago,” I said.
    “Love somebody from when you’re nineteen, one day he’s the same as ever, next day dead. So many tears, they seem to wash somethin’ out of you, they leave this emptiness.”
    “Loss is the hardest thing,” I said. “But it’s also the teacher that’s the most difficult to ignore.”
    Her fanning hand went still. She regarded me with an expression that I took to be surprised agreement.
    Because Birdie seemed to expect me to elucidate, I fumbled out what I thought she might want to say herself: “Grief can destroy you—or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.”
    After a moment, she fanned her face again, and closed her eyes.
    I gazed through the windshield at the desolation of fog, which might have been the waste and void from the time before time, when mankind did not exist or any beast, when there was only darkness on the face of the deep.
    Birdie said, “What you said. All of it. Same for me. So one day my emptiness was filled. First twinge came. Tuesday afternoon in May, it was. Not a physical twinge. Just a feelin’, like why don’t I drive one of the old garbage-collection routes. Wound up at Nancy Coleman’s place, former employee of ours. Husband left her a year earlier. Four hours before I show up, she gets a cancer diagnosis. Scared, alone. That year, I drove her to chemo, doctors’ appointments, shoppin’ for a wig, spent so much time together, more laughin’ than either of us would have thought at the start.”
    She closed the fan and returned it to her purse.
    “Another time, I need to drive, wind up at Bodi Booker’s house. Insurance agent, lifelong bachelor. Says he’s busy, I talk my way in. He’s makin’ hot chocolate. So we start talkin’ Fred. He and my Fred were bowlin’-team buddies, went fishin’ like the son Fred and I never could have. Half an hour, he tells me the hot cocoa was to wash down a bottle of pills, to kill himself. Year later, Nancy Coleman doesn’t have cancer anymore, she has Bodi, they married.”
    She retrieved her white gloves and worked her hands into them.
    “What about Swithin busted from bad romance?” I asked.
    “Swithin Murdoch. Good man, made a fool of himself over this girl. Leanna cleaned out his bank accounts, took a powder. Swithin almost lost his house, business, the works. I made a loan, he paid it back. So why you, Harry Lime?”
    “I think something bad would have happened to me at that storm drain if you hadn’t showed up.”
    “Bad like what?”
    Although her journey since Fred had shown her that under the apparent chaos of life lies a strange order, the truth of me would be more than she could absorb in the time that it would take her to drive the rest of the way to the harbor.
    “I don’t know, ma’am. Just a feeling I have.”
    She switched on the headlights and shifted the car out of park.
    “For true, you don’t know?”
    Whatever event had been pending at the storm-drain