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By Root 563 0

she thought, was starting in earnest to swallow her. But she wondered if she hadn’t already adjusted, however slightly, to the concept of Jack’s absence. The thought of his death, coming randomly on the tail of another thought — a memory of him, an image — didn’t rock her quite as violently as it had done the day before. How quickly the mind accommodated itself, she thought, even in such tiny increments. Perhaps it was that after a series of shocks, the body acclimated itself, like being inoculated — each subsequent shock delivering less impact. Or possibly this momentarily benumbed state was only a lull — a cease-fire. How would she know? There had never been a rehearsal for any of this.

She drove through the center of Ely, the light just beginning to flood the storefronts now, the earth having made its incremental journey eastward, just enough to show the town of Ely to the sun. She passed the hardware store and Beekman’s, a fiveand-ten-cent store that had survived the mall on Route 24, although its shelves were often dusty and thinly stocked. She passed an empty building that had once been a yarn and fabric shop that sold mill ends when the Ely Falls mill had been in business. She passed the Bobbin, the only place in town where one could get a drink or a sandwich. The Bobbin was open, three cars parked outside. She glanced at the dashboard clock: 7:05. In ten minutes, Janet Riley, a reading specialist for the middle school, and Jimmy Hirsch, an agent for MetLife, would be there having a bagel with cream cheese and an egg sandwich respectively. It was true, Kathryn thought, that you could set your watch by the habits of certain townspeople, and then you could check your watch regularly throughout the day by other villagers and their absolute insistence on routine.

Kathryn, for one, understood routine, which in Julia’s house had been a necessary hedge against chaos. And, of course, Jack had understood routine — particularly in a job that required a man to become a machine that would behave in precisely a certain way each time a particular set of circumstances came into play. Oddly, though, he was impatient with routine once out of the plane. He preferred to think of possibilities and be ready for them. Of the two of them, he was always the more likely to say, Let’s go into Portsmouth for lunch. Or, Let’s take Mattie out of school and go skiing.

Kathryn passed the high school, which lay just at the edge of the town center. She’d been working there now for seven years, having finished her degree when she moved back to Ely. It was an ancient brick building with large windows, a building that had already been old when Julia had gone to school there. There were fewer students in the school now than there had been in Julia’s day, when the mills were thriving.

For a few blocks, there were white houses with black shutters in small lots, many of them bordered with white fences — mostly Capes and Victorians, but some early colonials — that lent Ely what charm it had. But once beyond this inner ring, the neighborhood began to thin out, brief patches of woods or salt marsh separating one house from another, and continued to elongate, like a pull of taffy, until the end of that particular road, three miles farther along, where the stone house was.

She made the familiar turn and followed the street up the hill. No lights were on yet, and she guessed that Mattie and Julia were still in bed. She got out of the car and stood a minute in the stillness. There was always a moment in a morning, between the silence of the night before and the noise of the day to come, when it seemed to Kathryn that time stopped for a beat, when all the world was motionless, expectant. The ground around the car was dusted with a powdery snow that had fallen three days earlier and had not yet melted. On the rocks, the snow had frozen into a thin lace.

Julia’s house stood on a hill, which sometimes made chores such as bringing in groceries difficult, but the house gave a magnificent view westward if one was in the mood for it. The house was old, mid-nineteenth