When Chuck Ayers thinks about Cat, he thinks about the faded yellow-and-white-striped towel that lately he has been wearing around his neck like a wrestler on his way to a match.

That damn towel.

She used it for every bath, the towel hanging over the linen closet door to dry afterward, the smell of her pink soap as he walked by. And when they drove those hundreds of miles to Hilton Head every winter, she took the towel along, and it became her beach towel. Even as she got older, there was something alluring about the way she draped that towel around her body, or shook it out over one of the lounge chairs at the pool in South Carolina.

What can he do with this towel now, this towel he should have buried with her, this towel that he sleeps with some nights, this towel that hangs there, that stays wherever he leaves it?

He should fold it and put it into a box on a high shelf in the closet with the word towel written on it so he never forgets. So he never opens it again. So he never remembers her holding the towel over her arm, so naive, unaware that the towel would outlast her, that she’d never have a chance to donate it, to tear it into cleaning rags, to use it to protect something in the attic: an antique lamp, an old mirror.

He is glad for a second it didn’t come to that. That she got to use the towel fully and without stop.

And that is the first thing in forever he has been glad for. December 29, late in the afternoon, and the sun is going down. The quiet street is shadowed and darker outside the windows. Instinctively, Chuck lights the small ceramic Christmas tree and switches on the front porch light. He looks out the window and notices all the other houses. He imagines good smells of dinners, random sounds of family: someone calling up the steps, the surge of a dishwasher running, dice from a board game, wineglasses clinking.