Then again, it hadn’t been as easy as it was when he’d been twenty-two. But that was ten years ago, and even if thirty-two didn’t mean it was time to start looking into nursing homes, he was getting older. And he could feel it, too—there was a time during college when he and his friends would start their evenings at eleven o’clock and proceed to stay out the rest of the night. In the last few years, except for those times he was working, eleven o’clock was late, and if he had trouble falling asleep, he went to bed anyway. He couldn’t imagine any reason strong enough to make him want to stay up. Exhaustion had become a permanent fixture in his life. Even on those nights when Jonah didn’t have his nightmares—he’d been having them on and off since Missy died—Miles still awoke feeling... tired. Unfocused. Sluggish, as if he were moving around underwater. Most of the time, he attributed this to the hectic life he lived; but sometimes he wondered if there wasn’t something more seriously wrong with him. He’d read once that one of the symptoms of clinical depression was “undue lethargy, without reason or cause.” Of course, he did have cause....
What he really needed was some quiet time at a little beach-front cottage down in Key West, a place where he could fish for turbot or simply relax in a gently swaying hammock while drinking a cold beer, without facing any decision more major than whether or not to wear sandals as he walked on the beach with a nice woman at his side.
That was part of it, too. Loneliness. He was tired of being alone, of waking up in an empty bed, though the feeling still surprised him. He hadn’t felt that way until recently. In the first year after Missy’s death, Miles couldn’t even begin to imagine loving another woman again. Ever. It was as if the urge for female companionship didn’t exist at all, as if desire and lust and love were nothing more than theoretical possibilities that had no bearing on the real world. Even after he’d weathered shock and grief strong enough to make him cry every night, his life just felt wrong somehow—as if it were temporarily off track but would soon right itself again, so there wasn’t any reason to get too worked up about anything.
Most things, after all, hadn’t changed after the funeral. Bills kept coming, Jonah needed to eat, the grass needed to be mowed. He still had a job. Once, after too many beers, Charlie, his best friend and boss, had asked him what it was like to lose a wife, and Miles had told him that it didn’t seem as if Missy were really gone. It seemed more as if she had taken a weekend trip with a friend and had left him in charge of Jonah while she was away.
Time passed and so eventually did the numbness he’d grown accustomed to. In its place, reality settled in. As much as he tried to move on, Miles still found his thoughts drawn to Missy. Everything, it seemed, reminded him of her. Especially Jonah, who looked more like her the older he got. Sometimes, when Miles stood in the doorway after tucking Jonah in, he could see his wife in the small features of his son’s face, and he would have to turn away before Jonah could see the tears. But the image would stay with him for hours; he loved the way Missy had looked as she’d slept, her long brown hair spread across the pillow, one arm always resting above her head, her lips slightly parted, the subtle rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. And her smell—that was something Miles would never forget. On the first Christmas morning after her death, while sitting in church, he’d caught a trace of the perfume that Missy used to wear and he’d held on to the ache like a drowning man grasping a life preserver until long after the service was over.
He held on to other things as well. When they were first married, he and Missy used to have lunch at Fred & Clara’s, a small restaurant just down the street from the bank where she worked. It was out of the way, quiet, and somehow its cozy embrace made them both feel as if nothing would ever change between them. They hadn’t gone much once Jonah had been born,