When Never Comes

by Barbara Davis

The thought of what lay ahead left her exhausted as she mounted the stairs to the bedroom she and Stephen had shared. She desperately needed a shower, but the effort required to strip off her clothes was more than she could muster. Instead, she settled for brushing her teeth and washing her face. She was foraging in the medicine chest for the bottle of ibuprofen when the phone rang again. The number wasn’t one she recognized. She let the call go to voice mail, cringing as a reporter for the Boston Globe rambled through polite but curt condolences before finally getting around to business and asking for an interview. The message no sooner ended than the phone rang again. The Portland Press Herald this time, followed by the Times, the Mirror, and the Dallas Morning News. She let them all go to voice mail. The messages were largely the same, a pretense at sympathy followed by a request for an interview with the widow. When the phone rang a fifth time, she turned off the ringer, did the same with the phone in the kitchen, then shut down her cell for good measure. Gary was right. Her grief—and anything else she might be feeling—was no one’s business but her own. Out of habit, she wandered back down to the kitchen and made coffee, then roamed the house with her mug, forgetting to sip as she lingered over things she and Stephen had collected over the years; a handblown glass bowl they had discovered in a tiny shop in Rockport; a lamp made of driftwood designed by an artist from P...