Summary

Claire Scott has just buried her husband, and she cannot believe that he is truly gone. She only considers that she will never “hold his hand again. She would never roll over in bed and rest her head on his chest” (41). She remembers how meticulously he designed and built their house in Dunwoody, a suburb outside of Atlanta, feeling overwhelmed by all of the tasks he used to do for them, “all the things she did not know she needed to do” (42). She sits in the back of her limousine with her mother and grandmother. Last year, her grandmother was diagnosed with pleasant dementia, meaning that “she had forgotten all the perceived slights and neurotic obsessions that had made her such a nasty bitch for the first eight decades of her life” (44).

When the women arrive back at the house, they find three...