My Family Refused to Pick Me Up From the Airport After My Husband’s Funeral, Then They Saw Me on the Evening News

Then I went back to the hotel, packed his suitcase, and got on a plane.

I ordered the Uber standing outside the terminal under the overhang, while rain started falling in thin gray lines.

The driver’s name was Hassan. He drove a silver Camry that smelled like pine air freshener and coffee. When he saw the suitcases, one of them strapped shut, he jumped out and loaded them himself without being asked.

“Long trip?” he said, smiling, when we pulled away from the curb.

I looked out the window.

“Coming home or visiting?” he tried a few minutes later.

I didn’t answer that one either.

He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. I saw his eyes go to my hands. I was still holding the navy tie. I hadn’t put it back in the suitcase. I’d been holding it the whole time and hadn’t even noticed.

He stopped talking after that. He turned the radio down low. He drove carefully, slower than he had to.

The rain got heavier.

Halfway home, my phone buzzed. I looked at it. Kelsey, Troy’s wife, had sent a message to the group chat.

Kelsey: Sorry Amelia! Crazy day here. Hope you get home ok!

A heart. She’d sent a heart.

Then my mother sent a photo. It was a picture of the Hendersons’ dining room table, set with white candles and blue napkins. Lovely evening! she wrote under it.

She must have meant to send it to someone else.

Or maybe she didn’t.

I turned the phone off completely and put it in my pocket.

When we turned onto my street, Hassan slowed down. It was a quiet street in Southeast Portland, lined with old houses and big maple trees. Ours was the gray one near the end, with the crooked porch light James always meant to fix.

Every window was dark.

Hassan pulled into the driveway. He looked at the house. Then he looked at me in the mirror.

“Nobody home?” he asked gently.

“No.”

“You want me to bring the bags in? To the door?”

“I’ve got it.”

He got out anyway. He carried both suitcases up the porch steps and set them down by the door. The rain was coming down hard now. His jacket was soaked across the shoulders.

I fumbled with my keys. My hands wouldn’t work right. It took me three tries to get the key in the lock.

Hassan was still standing at the bottom of the steps.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Are you going to be okay tonight?”

I almost laughed. It was such a simple question. Nobody in my family had asked it.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

He nodded slowly. He didn’t look like he believed me.

Then he went back to his car. He sat in the driveway for almost a full minute with his headlights shining on the porch before he finally backed out and drove away.

I didn’t know it then, but that minute would end up mattering.

The house was freezing.

We’d turned the heat way down before we left, the way James always did when we traveled. “No reason to heat an empty house,” he’d say. Ten days in October, and the cold had settled into the walls.

I dragged the suitcases inside and left them by the front door. I didn’t turn on the lights.

I don’t know why. I think I didn’t want to see it. The house the way we’d left it, like nothing had happened. His coffee mug in the drying rack. His reading glasses on the side table. His muddy boots by the back door.

In the dark, it could still be any night. He could still be upstairs.

I walked into the living room by feel. My hand found the back of the big brown armchair. James’s chair. It was old and ugly and lumpy, and he’d bought it at a garage sale the first year we were married for twenty dollars. I’d begged him to get rid of it a hundred times.

Every Sunday morning, he sat in that chair with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. He was the last person under sixty in Portland who still got the paper delivered. He read me the weird stories out loud. A man in Ohio who built a house out of bottles. A goat that got elected honorary mayor of some town in Vermont.

I curled up in it with my coat still on and my shoes still on and the navy tie still in my hand.

The cushion still smelled like him. Coffee and cedar and something I could never name.

The silence pressed in from everywhere.

I thought I was completely alone.

Lying there in the dark, I kept thinking about the last normal Saturday we’d had before the trip.

It was three weeks earlier. I’d come home from the grocery store and found James on his knees in the side yard, next to the gas meter, with his face almost touching the pipe.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Smell that?”

I sniffed. “Smell what?”

“Rotten eggs. Faint. Come here. Get down here.”

I knelt in the wet grass next to him and sniffed again. Maybe. Maybe there was something. It was so faint I couldn’t be sure.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe? It could be the neighbor’s compost.”

“It’s not compost.” He stood up and wiped his knees. “That’s mercaptan. That’s what they add to natural gas so you can smell a leak. I’ve been smelling it on and off for a week. Out here and in the basement.”

“So call the gas company.”

“I did. Tuesday.”

“And?”

He made a face. “They sent a guy. Young guy. He walked around with his little detector for about ten minutes and said everything was within normal range. Said it’s probably just the meter venting. Said it’s an old neighborhood and old neighborhoods smell.”

“Well, there you go.”