Kinder Than Solitude. Yiyun Li

she had timidly played a simple tune on a piano at a colleague’s party. A child, not yet four, not old enough for piano lessons as her older siblings were, came quietly into the room, where Moran had found a moment away from the guests. Hello, Moran said, and the girl studied her with a proprietress’ pity and annoyance. What right, her eyes seemed to be saying, do you have to touch the piano? Moran blushed; the girl pushed her aside and banged the keys with both hands, and despite the violent disharmony, the girl seemed to be satisfied by her performance. This, she seemed to be showing Moran, was how you played an instrument.

      It was the girl whom Moran remembered now as she took her usual route to the neighborhood park, a grove that had not much to offer except an outdated playground with a metal skeleton of a train engine and a few squeaky swings, all rusty. Not everyone had the right to music, the girl’s eyes said, just as not everyone had the right to claim beauty, hope, and happiness.

      An old woman, tightly bundled in an oversized coat and a scarf, waited patiently for her black poodle, clad in a yellow vest, to finish investigating a rock. Moran muttered a greeting and was about to pass the pair when the old woman raised her small face. “Tell you what, don’t ever forget the date of your last period.”

      Moran nodded. When people talked to her, she always looked attentive, as though recognizing the significance of their words.

      “Every time I go to the doctor’s they ask that question,” the old woman said. “Like it matters at my age. If I have one piece of advice to give, go home and write it down somewhere you can find easily.”

      Moran thanked the old woman and walked on. Easily she could see herself lingering, listening to the woman retell the story of her long wait at the doctor’s, or at the vet’s office, or of a recent visit from her grandchildren, but such conversations with strangers had taken place enough times, in grocery stores and dry cleaners and hair salons and airports, that sometimes Moran wondered if her chief merit was her willingness to serve as a human receptacle for details. Sympathy and admiration and surprise she dutifully yet insufficiently expressed, and afterward the others moved on, forgetting her face the moment she was out of sight, or else they would not have seen her in the first place: she was one of those strangers people needed once in a while to make their lives less empty.

      When she returned, there was a message from Josef on her answering machine. Odd that more than one person had called her today. She waited until the evening to call back. She wanted him to think that she had things to do on a Saturday.

      When Josef picked up the phone, his voice was frail. Had Rachel talked with her, he asked, and Moran felt her heart sink. Rachel was the youngest of the four children of Josef and Alena; two years earlier, when Josef had retired from his job as a librarian at a local community college, he had sold the house and bought a condo a few blocks from Rachel and her husband, as they were about to have their third child. Three years younger than Moran, Rachel had been the only one of Josef’s children to openly oppose her father’s marriage to Moran.

      “Is there something Rachel needs to tell me?” Moran asked. She remembered her panic when her parents had called earlier. She had dreaded hearing that Josef was dead.

      Moran had always known that someday a phone call would come, worst if from one of Josef’s children. Still, hearing it from Josef himself—about his multiple myelomas, new since they had last seen each other in June—did not make the message any less harsh. For a moment she was struck by the odd sensation that he was already gone; their conversation, a memory for the future, sounded unreal, Josef’s tone apologetic, as though he had erred and unwisely contracted cancer.

      How long has he known, she asked, and he said four weeks. Four weeks, Moran said, feeling her anger swelling—but before she could launch into a tirade, Josef said that the prognosis had not been dire. Survived by a caring ex-wife, his obituary would read, Josef joked when silence set in.

      How long would he last, Moran wondered. How long does anyone, or anything, last? A marriage that had begun with enough affection could have gone right, love teased out with tenderness where passion was wanting, childlessness never a disappointment, as it was not a result of the age difference between Josef and Moran but of her adamant disinterest in motherhood. On holidays, Josef’s children and grandchildren would visit, and friends—men and women twenty or thirty years Moran’s senior, who had been Alena and Josef’s friends and who had taken care of Josef after Alena’s accident—would continue their tradition of seasonal get-togethers, which they’d begun long before Moran had existed for any of them.

      A caring ex-wife must be the best consolation prize, Moran thought, for a man to have, or for a woman to be called. Even if Josef’s children would oblige him, she would look like an awkward extra in an otherwise perfectly staged story in his obituary. For years Moran had been a regular visitor to a website that compiled obituaries from around the country. She never tired of the gently touched-up summaries of strangers’ lives. Without her intrusion, Josef’s life would be one of those perfect tales of love and loss: a solid upbringing in a solid midwestern town; a happy marriage to a childhood sweetheart ended abruptly by a careless driver; a beloved father and grandfather to four children and eleven grandchildren; a longtime member of the local choir, an avid gardener, a generous friend, a good man.

      “I’m coming to see you,” she said, deciding already that she would book the flights and the stay at her usual B&B after the phone call.

      “But it’s not June yet,” Josef said.

      During the past eleven years, Moran had visited Josef every June on his birthday, a lunch meeting rather than a dinner, because birthday dinners belonged to families, and he had children and grandchildren to celebrate with. He acted grateful for his birthday lunches, as though he did not know that they were for her sake more than for his.

      June was a long while away, and who knew if he would still be here when June came again? The same thought must have occurred to Josef, and he reassured Moran that the prognosis was good: the doctors thought there was still time, at least a couple years, depending on how the treatments went.

      Why, then, was he telling her at all; why not wait until they saw each other next June and spare her seven months of suspense? But she knew she was being unfair. He must have waited to break the news to other people, too—she should not expect to be among those called right away. “A plan should always be amendable,” she said. “Unless it’s bad timing for me to come?”

      Josef said it was not bad timing at all. The hesitation in his voice—imagined or real, she could not tell—stung Moran: in death as in life she had no claim on anything. In a lighter tone she told him not to worry, as she would be out of his hair before Thanksgiving. She would book her return ticket for Wednesday, she said; other than Rachel, his children and their families would probably come and join him on that day.

      “You think I’m worried about your staying through the holiday?”

      “I don’t want to impose,” she said. Her decision to visit, she knew, was already an imposition, but Josef was too kind to point that out. Her inconsistency, which she allowed only him to see, was in itself a love she had not given anyone else, though it was not the kind of love to have done him, or anyone else for that matter, any good.

      “Ever so like you,” Josef sighed. “To worry about things you don’t need to.”

      “You’re bound to people,” Moran said, though what she meant was that his time was bound to those around him. To think a person bound in any way—by blood, by legal documents of marriage or employment, by unsigned commitments to friends and neighbors and fellow human beings—is an illusion, though time is a different matter. In making commitments to others, what one really commits is one’s time: a meal, a weekend, a marriage as long as it lasts, a final moment by the deathbed; to make the mistake of going beyond that, to commit one’s true self—everyone has a story or two about that hard-learned lesson of giving more than is asked. “I can’t just come and ask to be among them.”

      “Why not, Moran?”

      “I thought you would have known by now that I don’t belong,” Moran said. That she had not belonged and could not blend in