She counted her losses in some of the usual daily places, that dimple in the mattress where he slept next to her, naked all those years, hairy and sometimes, maybe too often, unshowered, with his raw stable smell. She ached for that sour odor now.

She missed the way he always brought in the morning paper, folded it unread until she found the crossword and turned it over to him, a ritual, 40 years practiced.

There was the loss from his way with numbers, the checkbook balanced within a banker's hair, investing their little extra money so it grew and gave them chances to live beyond their means, two or three weeks every year.

Now she watched Jeopardy alone. He always knew things she didn't. Where is Orcas Island? What is cellulose? She ached for his snide remarks when someone missed. She regretted that they had never tried to get on the show. Now he was out of the competition. Dead.

The place where she felt the loss the very most, the way it haunted her like bats in the attic, making her cry every time, was when she came out of the shower, dripping, steaming, shy as a butterfly in a hollyhock.

With Perfect timing, he would trot in to dry her back. She tried to remember a time when he didn't come. The sound of the pipes hammering when the water was turned off, was his clarion call to action. But once when they were so angry with each other, over what one of the kids had done to a neighbor, he didn't show up, but he left her a note that said, "I couldn't tonight, I might have dried your head off."

Once and the only other time she could remember, one night, when he had two wisdom teeth pulled.
That time, too, she dried herself.

Every other night, he'd massage her lightly his hands like a sculptor's that loved marble, there would be a light moan from her, and on cue, he'd always say, "You got a nice back there, lady. How's the front?" That's what she missed the most. There was the loss that wouldn't die.

- The End -