The town smelled of cold linen and wood smoke when Anna drove into it, as if the air itself had been folded and put away for a long night. She had thought she would feel more — fury, relief, a clean professional distance that she wore on shoots — but the first sensation was only an odd, domestic ache, a recognition of small things: the crooked lamppost by the post office, Mr. Lang's truck still parked where he'd always left it, the same strip of cracked sidewalk where she had once skinned her knee. The house rose at the end of the lane, unchanged in those ways that matter only because memory fills them: the paint flaked where wind and rain had found purchase, the hydrangeas had gone to seed, and the mailbox still bore her mother's name in a careful, slanted script.
Henry was at the door with a sack over his shoulder and a face that had learned to carry weather. He looked smaller in daylight than she remembered, his shoulders hunched not from age but from a discipline he'd given himself—he had practiced staying upright against whatever came. There was a brief, awkward hush at the entry, the kind of silence that wears grooves from familiarity and grief. They did the thing people do when they don't know what to say: they touched hands, murmured a few practical phrases, and let a strange new politeness take over where something closer should have been. He kept his eyes steady and offered a mouth that could not find its soft corners.
Clara met her in the kitchen with a face that was trying not to be a history of old resentments. Clara's hair had gone to gray at the temples, more from the weight of having stayed than from time itself. They embraced in a deliberate, measured way. There was gratitude in her arms like an accounting, as if every small kindness had been tallied and interest added. The house inside was saturated with the minor arrangements adults make to meet the needs of a death: platters of food on the table, a stack of hymn sheets, a shoebox of mismatched gloves on the entry bench. Photographs clustered on the mantle, smiling faces preserved and arranged with the same intent as an exhibit.
At the funeral, the minister used phrases that floated and didn't land: "She was kind," "She loved her family," "She did so much for others." People leaned in with recollections that all fit neatly into the space left by the woman's life. Anna found the speeches peculiarly orchestrated. Grief here had been practiced, polished and passed around like a plate of cookies. There were neighbors she recognized, old friends from school and the woman from the bakery who handed out biscuits with a gentle insistence that life continue. Hands stroked her sleeve; relatives repeated lines she'd heard at other funerals. Anna's film training gave her a peripheral patience — she watched how grief was performed, the textures of hush and small talk, how people selected anecdotes that would not complicate the comfortable picture they wanted to leave behind.
She moved through rituals with the same precise detachment she had learned in her trade. She signed the register and nodded at faces she hardly remembered until their names were supplied. She accepted casseroles and veiled condolences and a clumsy attempt at humor from an old neighbor who thought laughter might break the surface tension. When they returned to the house for the meal afterward, the table bent under the weight of contributions, and the noise of friends and acquaintances filled in the gaps where private words should have been. At dusk, Henry retired to the back porch in his usual silence; he always preferred to inhabit corners where he could be useful without being required to speak. Clara fussed over plates and the arrangement of chairs, every movement an effort to make order out of the small chaos of loss.