her curfew; her acne; her relentless punctuality; her snapping gum; the bubblegum pop in her CD collection; her stifled sneezes; the smell of her menthols; her taste in movies and wine: sweet and cheap; the taste of her tongue in the morning: sour; the sounds she made in an asthma attack; the leftovers she neither threw out nor ate; the hair clinging to the glass door of the shower; the neighbor she forgave for bending my fender; the shabby houseplants, the mangy foster cats, her mother, her brother and her brother's ex-lover: dying things she insisted on saving, only to watch them succumb in our home; the money spent on bottles of vodka; the powder she left on my shaving mirror; the way she was always forgetting her keys'”not the fact, but the way'”as if she didn't care if she got back in the house; the late nights with no phone calls; the long-distance calls to a stranger in Lancaster; the affair (the whole thing); the day she moved out; the two months she was gone; the bruises she brought home; our tense reconstruction of the life she abandoned; the days she seemed to miss him; her smoking again; the brittle edge of her rage while she quit; that whole shitty, wasted year; then the Lamaze classes; the nights she wouldn't wake up to change wet sheets; the back-to-school shopping trips; the day she forgot to tell me to pick our son up from cub scouts; her habit of quizzing the kids on their homework; her ivy-league expectations; the silence in the car after we left them at state college; the one morning she overslept, lost her job, let the car roll into a fire hydrant and spilled hot tea down her leg; her jealousy when I hugged the secretary at my retirement party; her crying over the foreclosure notice; watching her fill out the change of address; the yard sale; the blaming; the shame; the sympathy cards from her friends; driving her away from the house where we raised our family; the bright-but-bland painting she hung in our tiny, sterile new apartment; her sighs when the kids left after brief visits; the boring soaps and game shows when she had the remote; the evenings she fell asleep before I could say goodnight; her glass full of dentures; the snoring and coughing into her pillow; the sewing she left all over the furniture; the thread; the patterns; the pins; the doctors; the needles; the chemo; the end; the feeling left behind.