In the old house, in the shade of the silver dollar gum and the dead oak waiting to be ignited, the sage paint peeling and the yard made meager by drought, he had loved her. It was a long-ago love, a love that began and ended so quickly he didn't remember it so much as know that it had once occurred. He had an impossible memory where he observed, from the outside in, his child self kneeling over a narrow bed, praying to whatever higher power did or did not exist to let him die at the same time as her. He felt as an echo now his wish to never outlive her, and his dark hair stuck up in tufts at the back of his neck.

It was midwinter. The morning obdurate, the road out of town longer and steeper than he remembered. He passed the clapboard church, where one year thunder had splintered the cross and the faithful and the damned alike had thought it more than chance. The brick-and-ivy courthouse where he had stood as a boy, right hand raised, and sworn an oath to a country he could hardly pronounce the name of. Then there was the cemetery, the lichen devouring the names of Confederate soldiers. Strange to think now how many afternoons he had spent walking amongst the dead, ignorant of history. Letting dates and epithets fall from his tongue like dirty rain. Inventing for each man below the dirt a new life, long, bloodless, and peaceful. Harebells had bloomed on the hillsides then, bursts of lavender between beech trees boughed low, but in the twelve years since the land had endured without rain. He was returning to desert, to dust.

Twelve years the shooting had kept him away; somehow her tragedy was harder to bear than any of his own. He paid three nurses to live with and care for her in alternating shifts, to bathe her and dress her and take her errant pulse. He counted himself lucky, that he had the foresight to become a rich man.

He thought of her every day.

Because he hadn’t known her presence, he thought of her absence. He thought of the room which housed her things, the cream on her dresser scented like jasmine, the fraying edge of her blue silk scarf, the one photograph she had brought from the mainland, noisy and grayscale, of herself as a young woman. Her hair had been shorn to her nape, her dark eyes vivid and sad. He thought of the white of her sheets and the bareness of her walls. The door left ajar which he peered through like a thief, watching her gesticulate to an invisible someone: I won't be driven out like a dog.

Her worn heels missing from the rack, the empty kitchen shelf, the potatoes sprouting in the yard.

He thought of the sadness he had felt, the deep violet that was his loneliness before leaving, and he wondered what else he could turn into memory.

At once, he was grateful. That he had listened to her in lieu of himself, that the house was still standing.

It was good, he thought, to have a place to say goodbye to.