I sat in that car until they left, and I watched the woman lock the door behind them like she’d done it a hundred times. The man with the cane stopped on the porch and looked back through the window before he got into his truck, and my dog was still standing there, staring at him. I went inside after they were gone and checked every room. Nothing had been moved except the throw blanket, and there was a grocery bag on the kitchen counter that I knew I hadn’t bought. Inside were the things my husband used to eat when he was sick, the same brand of crackers, the same tea, even the little biscuits I used to keep beside his chair. I called the woman that evening and asked her how she knew what to buy.
She didn’t deny being in my house. She said she’d been coming every weekday for almost three years because my husband had asked her to. I told her that was impossible because he’d been dead for four years, and she said, “I know.” Then she told me the man I’d seen with her was the one who had been helping her keep a promise. My husband had given him a key before he died and told him there was something in the house he wanted me to find, but only after the dog stopped looking for him at the door. I asked what she meant, and she said my husband had told her the dog would understand before I did. Then she said something that made me sit down: he hadn’t been visiting me before he died. He’d been visiting her.
I asked where, and she gave me an address across town. I drove there the next morning with my husband’s old photograph in my hand, and the man with the cane was waiting on the porch. He looked at the picture and said, “That’s him,” but then he corrected himself and said, “That’s the man I knew.” He told me my husband had been coming there for years because the woman was raising a boy who believed my husband was his grandfather. I said my husband had no grandchildren he hadn’t told me about. The man looked toward the house and said, “No, ma’am. He wasn’t your husband’s grandson.” Then the front door opened, and a teenage boy stepped outside carrying the same worn leather toolbox my husband had kept in our garage for thirty years.
