She could knock on his door, the way she often did before Henry died, and say, “Chad, honey, you’re missing a beautiful day out there.” But this was back when nothing was really wrong. This was in that other life when Chad might oversleep a half hour if he’d been up late the night before, watching some rental movie with a friend. But these days he was sleeping in later and later, rising sometimes as Jeanie was having her lunch, that dazed look on his face that seemed to ask if he’d missed something important. Jeanie put her keys down in the glass bowl that she kept on the hall table. The house was deathly still, and that was the adjective she had come to prefer when she walked in and stood in the hallway, stunned by the silence that settled around her. What she wished now, knowing that she couldn’t undo the dead, was that Lisa were back home again, still growing up, still dating different boys until she found the right one, still talking about the children she might have one day.
