As Husbands Go by Susan Isaacs

from now, when the triplets were in high school, or later, when I was on my deathbed, we’d learn Jonah had been living as Dottore Giovanni Giordano, treating the poorest of the poor in the slums of Naples, not taking even a lira for his work.
    Except that wasn’t what happened.

Chapter Five

    “I know you came here to keep yourself from staring at the phone, trying to will it into ringing,” Andrea Brinckerhoff said brightly. She picked up a speck of floral foam from our worktable and flicked it into the green plastic trash can. Andrea rarely said anything non-brightly. She seemed to have modeled her personality on one of those debutantes in 1930s movies: a martini in one hand, a cigarette holder in the other, laughing in the face of doom. “Though I’m assuming you call-forwarded so it would ring here.”
    “So it would ring on my cell. Car, bathroom: I could be anyplace and I’d be able to hear it.”
    “Excellent!”
    I understood Andrea’s over-the-top brightness on this morning was an effort aimed at keeping up my spirits—though her detractors might claim she simply wasn’t touched by other people’s sorrow.
    She headed for the coffeepot, her head swiveling slowly back and forth as she walked, searching for stray bits of stem or leaf on the concrete floor. Not that I watched her every step. I was flipping through the pocket-sized brown leather phone book I’d brought with me, the one Jonah had used until two years earlier, when he finally surrendered to a BlackBerry. I finished his A’s and B’s and began the C’s, copying down names and numbers of anyone who might be in his life currently, people he could have seen or spoken to in the last couple of weeks.
    Andrea handed me coffee in one of her L’Objet porcelain mugs. She’d chosen the Aegean-green style; its handle was twenty-four-karat gold. “If I might suggest . . .”
    I listened. Andrea was thorough. While we both did the same jobs—floral design, client development, running the business—we both accepted reality and roles. She was the efficient, let’s-create-a-system one. I was the more imaginative and (despite Andrea’s copy of the Social Register that leaned against Contemporary Approaches to Floral Art on the shelf above her desk) had the more upmarket aesthetic. Not that Andrea was Miss Azalea Plant in a Green Plastic Cachepot, but she had too many musts and no-nos to be an exciting designer. She stuck to the old tired-out rules, like no bear grass or carnations ever or that heritage roses and English ivy in Grandmère’s 1780 silver teapot were the ultimate word in elegance.
    “Instead of writing a list,” she said, “put a mark next to each name. That way you can tell at a glance who you need to call.”
    “Good idea,” I murmured. Was it? I hadn’t a clue, but she sounded authoritative. My thoughts were dark and swirling, like a tornado. The mere idea of a system was soothing.
    “See? Make a dot on the left side of the entry. After you speak to that person, put a check mark on the right.”
    I either knew or had heard Jonah mention about half the names I’d gotten to in his phone book. That I didn’t know the others wasn’t particularly meaningful. Like many surgeons, my husband was meticulous to the point of being a pain, or worse. When he hung a tie on his pull-out rack, the pointy bottom of all the ties had to be at the same level. If he was in the kitchen when I was cooking and overheard me mumble to myself, “Where the hell is the dill?” he’d stare at me not just in disbelief but with displeasure, as in How can you go through life and not have a precise place for everything? I’d told him the need for a precise place for things was a definite plus for a guy who reconfigured faces. He had to be finicky about detail: like Where are the sutures? or How many millimeters to the right do I move this nose? And the proof was right there in his phone book. Nearly all the entries I didn’t recognize had a teeny P