The fluorescent lights in the preparation room of Miller Mortuary had this awful, humming yellow tint that made everybody look half-sick, even before the boxes of paperwork came out. Wallace Miller stood behind his tall oak podium with a black pen in his hand, tapping the rubber eraser against the wood in a steady, maddening rhythm. He had known Mike since they were both teenagers running trotlines down by the river, so I suppose he thought he was doing me a favor by handling the paperwork himself instead of letting one of the younger boys do it.

He kept clearing his throat like he swallowed a piece of gravel, looking over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses at me while I sat in that slippery vinyl chair that always smelled like floor wax and old winter coats.

“We need to get the notices sent to the Gazette before four o’clock if you want it in Thursday’s edition,” Wallace said, his voice dropping into that low, practiced drone funeral directors use when they are trying to be gentle. “They charge by the line usually, but we can bundle it with the memorial service details. How would you like the obituary to read?”

I looked down at my hands in my lap. My knuckles were red from scrubbing the kitchen grease off the stove earlier that morning before the ambulance arrived to take him away, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember if I had turned the coffee pot off before I walked out the door.

The house had been too quiet since seven o’clock that morning, just the hum of the old refrigerator and the grandfather clock in the hall that Mike was always forgetting to wind. I didn’t want to sit there listening to Wallace talk about legacy or passing on to a better place because I knew damn well Mike wasn’t thinking about any better place when his heart gave out in the garage. He was thinking about his tackle box.

“Mike is dead,” I said.

Wallace blinked. He stopped tapping his pen against the oak wood. The silence stretched out between us for three or four seconds, heavy and awkward, until he leaned forward over the podium.

“That’s… very short, Donna.”

I shrugged my shoulders because my neck felt stiff and tight, like I’d been sleeping on a rock. “How much do obituaries cost?”

“One dollar per word,” Wallace said, frowning down at his ledger book like he thought I was testing him. “Standard rate for the county paper.

But nobody just puts four words. People want to say something about their character, their work at the mill, their time with the VFW.”

I nodded slowly, watching the dust motes float through the yellow light above his head. “Then that’s all I need.”

Wallace sighed and put his pen down on the blotter. He rubbed the bridge of his nose where his glasses had left two little red dents. He and Mike had spent forty years out on the water together freezing their fingers off every November, drinking black coffee out of dented thermoses and arguing about whether bass liked live minnows or plastic grubs better. I guess he felt bad sitting there looking at me like I was some kind of cold-hearted stranger instead of the woman who had washed Mike’s mud-caked Carhartts every Sunday night for thirty-six years.

“Listen,” Wallace said kindly, leaning his forearms on the podium and looking right at me. “I cover a few extra words for free out of my own pocket when it’s old friends.

You can make it a little more personal. Tell people who he was.”

My face brightened up just a bit, because I remembered something that had been sitting out behind the shed taking up space and gathering pine needles for the last three summers. “Oh! In that case…”

I smiled across the desk at him, and I could tell by the way his eyebrows twitched that he wasn’t expecting what came out of my mouth next.

“Mike is dead. Boat for sale.”

Wallace didn’t say anything for a long time after that. He just stared at me, his mouth half-open, while the clock on the wall made a loud tick-tock sound that seemed to echo off the wood paneling. He looked down at his ledger book where he had already written down the first four words, his pen hovering over the paper like he didn’t know whether to laugh or call the doctor. I didn’t care much either way because my feet were starting to swell in my good walking shoes and I still had to go home and figure out what to do with three full freezers of crappie fillets Mike had hauled in before his knees went bad.

By Thursday morning, the paper was sitting in the metal box at the end of the driveway when the mail carrier came by at ten past eleven. I walked down the gravel path in my house slippers to get it, the wet grass soaking the toes of my socks before I even reached the post. The wind off the river was carrying that sharp, damp smell of rotting willows and mud that always came right before a hard freeze. I unfolded the Gazette right there by the mailbox, my thumb finding the obituary page tucked between the farm auction ads and the church announcements.

There it was in black ink, right in the middle of the column between old man Henderson and the district judge’s sister.

Mike is dead. Boat for sale. Inquire at the back door.

It was shorter than the recipe for cornbread my mother used to paste inside the pantry door, but it took up less space and told people everything they needed to know about how things stood. I folded the paper back up and tucked it under my arm, walking slow back toward the house with the gravel shifting under my heels. The phone started ringing before I even got the latch clicked back into place on the screen door, but I let it ring.

Within an hour, the first pickup truck pulled off the highway and bumped down our long dirt drive, throwing up dry dust against the side of the weathered barn. It was a red Ford with a rusted tailgate and two empty rod holders bolted to the bed, driven by a man I didn’t recognize from town, maybe someone from up near the quarry road. He got out slow, pulling his cap off to wipe his forehead with a gray handkerchief, looking first at me standing on the porch and then over toward the aluminum skiff sitting under the walnut tree with its tarp half-rotted off.

“I seen your notice in the Gazette,” the man shouted over the sound of his engine idling rough before he reached down to turn the key off. “Is that sixteen-foot Grumman still seaworthy?”

I stayed right there on the top step with the folded newspaper in my hand, looking past him at the gray water of the river visible through the bare branches down in the bottomland. The motor on that boat hadn’t been turned over since the first frost of the year before, and the hull had a dent in the port side where Mike hit a submerged stump near the lock and dam while he was chasing yellow perch. It wasn’t much of a boat, and Mike wasn’t much of a husband toward the end when the whiskey started tasting better than breakfast, but it was property and it was taking up room we didn’t have.

“Bring a five-gallon can of fresh gas and two hundred dollars cash,” I told him, my voice carrying clear across the yard over the ticking of his hot engine block. “And you load it onto your own trailer because I ain’t lifting a finger to help you push it.”

The man stood there by his truck door for a second, looking at me like he was trying to figure out if I was joking or just mean, and then he reached back inside his cab to grab his wallet.