In the beginning, when Guy traveled away from her she worried. He never left her except on business and then, in her opinion, there was peril. He was a structural engineer. He wanted to design museum buildings but he made a living by working on roads. His business trips were to forsaken barren places, where cold winds blew all winter and the summers were brutally hot.

During those early times Nancy couldn’t help fretting about plane crashes, rental car accidents, on-the-job injuries. Guy called her every night and told her he missed her so much it actually hurt, and she’d respond with coos of tender concern.

But after 12 years her imaginings changed. They went from persistent worries to occasional crazy fantasies. Painless as an execution: swift and fatal. If it was a plane crash no passenger knew what hit him. If Guy died in the rental car, he was the only fatality and the truck driver was blameless. Her power plant fantasies were vaguer; she had him somehow shaken off his perch but not conscious of it.

Just news of his death. Friends and family rallying around her and the kids, arranging the funeral issues. A quiet time and then, gradually, a return to life. Comfortable. Not chaotic. And friends would probably introduce her to men: a widow was so much likelier that way than everyone’s spare divorcees.

Nancy is thankful that she is not psychic. She has so many worries that if they were prophetic her future would teem with trouble and her meditations could never be calm. But nothing necessarily bad happens to her after a nightmare. Earthquakes don’t occur after she gets that funny feeling on an unseasonably warm spring or fall day. She’s quite sure she didn’t really wish Guy dead.

It was quick and painless. He didn’t see it coming. He wasn’t on a tower. She never would have imagined it.

The plant he was inspecting produces blacktop. He was inside a huge conveyor when the operator ignored all standard precautions and started the machine. Two tons of hot asphalt hit him from behind. Death was immediate.

There was a month of amazing solace from their community. A trust fund was started for all five kids. Neighbors chipped in and covered the funeral. Insurance money let Nancy pay off the house and provided enough day-to-day income that she could drop work to part-time and finally go to college.

The biggest surprise about it all for Nancy is that she doesn’t miss Guy. At all. She keeps waiting for a sadness to creep into her but she thought it would have happened by now. It isn’t that she’s numb. It’s more that she used up all the good feelings about Guy already.

She thinks she ought to feel more for him. She wonders if she’s in trouble.