She was warning me. Yet I couldn’t muster the energy to tend to my aunt. The few times I had, I’d hated every moment.

“You’re lucky, you know,” she’d decreed bitterly as I arranged the silver service to her liking and poured her first cup of peppermint tea.

“How is that, Aunt?”

“You don’t know the intensity of a mother’s love.” Her eyes were baleful, her pudgy finger crooked.

“I loved him, too, Aunt Clara.” I moved away to re-swaddle the bed iron so that I wouldn’t have to look at her.

“Yes, in your own, childlike way. But not profoundly.”

It would be so easy to agree. But I despised her for discounting my grief, and it surely showed in my face. How could it not?

Next time, I let Mavis take care of the tea service, stopping in just long enough for an obsequious curtsy and to slip a brooch from the top of her dresser into my pocket. I didn’t trust myself not to hold the iron too close to her toes, or to upend her tea in her lap.

Family, indeed.

 On Christmas Day, however, Mavis’s warning comes back to sting. We’ve left Quinn behind to attend church. It is my first outing since his return.

At least it’s a diversion. I feel unfamiliar to myself a secret widow in a starched black dress. I stare out the rocking carriage, with its passing convergent view of Jamaica Pond now in steely winter freeze.

Uncle Henry and Aunt Clara sit side by side and in hushed voices decide on a service for Will. It will be a sort of funeral, body or none, with selected hymns and readings. All planned for sometime after the spring thaw.