The house still smelled like my husband, Daniel, some mornings. I couldn’t explain it.
At 44, a widow for almost three years, I had learned that grief lived in the strangest corners, like the coat hook by the door where his old windbreaker used to hang.
Our suburb was quiet, all clipped hedges and neighbors waving from driveways. We’d bought the little ranch house a little over a year before my husband got sick, back when the future still looked like a long, ordinary road.
I couldn’t explain it.
Tyler, 10, was finally laughing again, mostly because of the puppy we’d brought home in the spring. His dog was a scrappy little thing named Biscuit, who chewed everything that wasn’t nailed down.
But the bike was different.
Daniel gave our son the blue mountain bike two weeks before the cancer took him.