Like Wordle for this generation, the obit section is Rose’s daily pop of dope. She pays extra just to hold the paper since it’s become a relic to the ones with more time. Rose started the routine even before her husband’s face went limp, then his heart. She rarely recognizes the names, but selfishly studies them for how her summary might read.                               

          Walter Fitzgerald.
          Donna Mazzint. Jesus, only 28 years old.
          Thomas “Tommy” Linklater.

Her breaths stall. Tommy. They’d gone steady for five years — high school and two calendars of war. She thinks of the night he came back to her. Eyes desolate, spirit somewhere else. He refused to discuss whatever he’d seen, like the smell of murder fire or the spill of crimson. She only knew that he suddenly hated silence and adored dry socks, toothpaste, and flame sticks that gave his breath a cold pierce like spearmint.

She remembers their first peck. He cupped her shoulder, then swooned in. They didn’t do it right, but felt the euphoria anyway. After his return, the last one they shared was just as awkward but without the bliss.

Rose saw Tommy later in life. Old friends said he moved back home after selling a business and divorcing a wife. She noticed him at the supermarket late one evening, shifting through bruised pears. She watched him between the gaps of the soup shelves. So many options, too many. He still looked familiar, despite lower back pounds and age beneath his eyes. He’d kept most of his hair, just ashier. Nothing was ever said.

Rose glides her fingers across his black and white photograph and stares past the crisscrossed pane of her window. She thinks about her dead husband, her children, her grandbabies, her routines, missteps, downfalls, triumphs.

But most of all, she wonders.