Part Two
I married Bianca when I was thirty-eight, and she noticed, pretty quickly, how much my Sundays with Elias actually meant to me.
"You're going over there again?" she asked one morning, half teasing, half not.
"An hour. Maybe two."
"You're really going to keep doing this every single week? For years?"
"He doesn't have anyone else, Bee."
He doesn't have anyone else.
She softened then, the way she always did, and handed me a tin of cookies she'd baked the night before. "Take these to him. Tell him I said hello."
I did. Elias held that tin like it was something genuinely precious and asked me three separate times to make sure I thanked her properly.
That was the same Sunday he mentioned Dale again — the nephew who only ever called when something was wrong with his car, or his rent, or some new scheme that needed a small loan to get off the ground.
"Dale came by last month," Elias said, stirring his coffee in slow, unhurried circles. "Asked what I was planning to do with the house."
"What'd you tell him?"
"Told him I was planning to keep living in it." He smiled, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes that time. I let it sit there without pushing further.
I left that afternoon thinking I should finally bring Bianca over properly, introduce them for real instead of through cookie tins and secondhand hellos. Elias would have liked that.
I never got the chance.
I noticed the porch light first. It was the following Sunday, a bright October morning, and Elias's porch light was still burning at nine a.m. He never left it on past sunrise — he was particular about small things like that, the way a man gets when he's lived alone too long and only has his own habits left to be careful about.
He never left it on past sunrise.
I stood in my driveway with the newspaper in one hand and stared at that yellow bulb glowing uselessly against the daylight. Something felt wrong, but I told myself he'd simply forgotten, and that I'd mention it gently when I dropped off the groceries.
I went back inside to finish my coffee and couldn't focus on a single headline.
By noon, an ambulance pulled up to his house. A neighbor across the street told me what I already knew before she'd finished the sentence. Elias had passed away in his sleep. Peacefully, they said. He was eighty-four. I was forty.
I stood on his lawn a long time after everyone had cleared out, staring at the porch light somebody had finally switched off. Bianca found me there an hour later and didn't say anything at all. She just took my hand and stood there with me.
The funeral was smaller than I'd expected. Much smaller. A handful of distant acquaintances stood near the back, a tired-looking pastor read from a worn book, and I kept thinking, the entire time, that Elias had deserved a fuller room than that.
Across the aisle, one man stood out from the rest. Sharp dark suit, phone in hand, thumb moving occasionally, like the service itself were a minor inconvenience he was tolerating.
Like the service itself were a minor inconvenience he was tolerating.
When it ended, he walked straight toward me before I could leave.
"You must be the grocery guy," he said, offering a handshake that felt more like a transaction than a greeting. "Dale. Elias's nephew."
"Nolan. I'm sorry for your loss."
A thin smile. "Sure. Over a decade of Sunday visits, huh? That's a lot of free time to invest in some old man."
My jaw tightened, but I kept my voice level. "He was my friend."
"Right." Dale glanced past me toward the casket. "Well, friend or not, the house is going on the market fast. Already got someone interested. No point letting it sit empty."
