The age factor was important, Eddie struggled to say, because Allan had left instructions for Eddie to read a certain poem— Yeats’s “When You Are Old.” What was embarrassing was that Allan had imagined that Ruth would already be an old woman when he died. He’d quite correctly assumed that, given the eighteen-year difference in their ages, he would die before she would. But, typical of Allan, he’d never imagined that he would die and leave his widow still a young woman. “Jesus, this
