Ada had been the first girl Harold had ever kissed. He’d been seven and Ada had been six and they’d gone away to Harold’s room during some family gathering. They’d stuck out their tongues like they were about to lick a frozen pole, and then his mom had walked in and Harold had turned red. He’d thought he was in love with Ada for a while, but then, just like everything else, it had passed. Adolescent infatuation led clumsily and inevitably to familial admiration. He would have brought it up now as a joke if he hadn’t been wearing her dead husband’s suit.

Harold had landed in Illinois wearing his airport security flip-flops and carrying the magazine he’d bought at LAX. He was glad at first that his cousin Ada was late picking him up, figuring it gave him enough time to dig out more Midwest winter-worthy clothing from his baggage. Just as he’d heard, bemusedly, that his bag had been flown instead to Toledo and would be sent back to sunny Southern California in time to meet up with his own return flight, Ada came smiling up at him.

“I’m so sorry I’m late!” she exclaimed. “I never come to the airport.” She smiled graciously as if she had forgotten herself. She hugged him spiritedly and then pulled back to get a better look at him.

She was still beautiful, the belle of the family, Anna Karenina in boat shoes and faded jeans, though it had been a while since he’d last seen her and he couldn’t pretend not to notice the crow’s feet or streaks of white in her hair. He imagined she was probably thinking the same thing about him. “Is that all you brought?” she asked. “Where are your bags?”

The road from the airport passed through empty fields and farmland and property scheduled for development. “Shady Grove Villas,” proclaimed a large sign, though there weren’t any groves nearby, and the sign provided the only shade around. Harold stared out the window and listened to the radio. No one lived here anymore. He’d always told Ada she should have left town. She wasn’t like the other girls they grew up with, he’d say; she was different. But then after high school she’d met Lew, and together they’d had a little girl. They named her Samantha, and that seemed to seal the deal.

Harold knew that she had been happy and maybe she’d been right about staying all along. One night Lew hadn’t made it home from work. His car was found submerged in the river below the Boones Ferry Bridge, his body caught in some reeds several hundred yards downstream from that. Ada had cried and stayed put in the same house for nearly two years.

“How’s California?” she asked. “How’s the weather?”

“It’s goddamned warmer than here,” said Harold. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Are you hungry? Sam doesn’t get out of preschool for another hour.”

He shook his head. “I ate on the plane,” he said. They were near the town now, and he turned away from the passing landscape. “How is Sam? How are you?”

“Okay,” she shrugged. She glanced at him doubtfully and then returned her attention to the road. “The service is tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ll want to wear those clothes.”

“No,” he shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any excuse my mom’s liable to accept for me wearing flip-flops and a tee-shirt to her funeral.”

Ada laughed in spite of herself. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure we can find something for you to wear. You’re about the same size, aren’t you? You can wear one of Lew’s suits.”

That night Ada made polenta for dinner with chicken and mushrooms and fried tomatoes. Her daughter Samantha made a face at everything but the chicken and Harold said, “This is amazing, Ada. Really.”

Ada nodded. “It’s your mom’s recipe,” she said.

When dinner was over and Samantha didn’t want to get in the bath, Harold told her he’d show her a trick if she cooperated.

“What is it?” she asked.

“You’ll have to wait until the bath to find that out,” said Ada, smiling at Harold. After Samantha clambered in, he bent over the edge of the bathtub with his hands clasped together, dipped them into the water making a pocket of air, and then squeezed them shut. The result was a farting noise and a squirt of water that splashed up. Samantha squealed, not without pleasure, and asked him to do it again.

After Ada had dried and put Samantha in pajamas and bed, Harold opened up a bottle of wine and they sat down in the living room. They talked about the following day and drank the wine. “It’s so hard,” said Ada. “I don’t even know how to describe it. Sometimes I think if I could just describe it it’d make things easier. Like if I can’t replace the love, I could at least define the loss.”

Harold nodded and didn’t even try to say anything to that, and then she went to collect the suits for him to try on. There were three of them: a light grey suit, a black suit, and a dark blue pinstriped suit. She set them before him with, Harold thought, a sense of appreciation that finally they’d be put to use again, but also, he noticed, just beneath that, a little melancholy. Harold reached for the pinstripe and Ada pulled it back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Not that one.”

Harold smiled and nodded. “How about the black one?”

“The black one’s fine,” she said. “Why don’t you try it on? You can use our bedroom.”

Harold followed her suggestion. Lew had been a slightly larger man than he was, but Harold looked at himself in the mirror and still thought he looked very respectable. He tried to disregard all the places where the suit didn’t fit him just right. The belt could be pulled tighter, he could stand up straighter; they were minor inconsistencies.

He heard the phone ring downstairs and heard Ada answer it. He sauntered around the room, still in the black suit, red tie hanging loose around his neck, looking at the pictures on the wall. They were mostly of Lew or Lew and Ada, on their wedding day, somewhere in the snow, Lew and Ada with little Sam between them, taken what must have been weeks before the accident.

Turning around he saw her standing in the doorway watching him. He hadn’t heard her come in. “It looks good on you,” she said.

Harold turned red. “It’s a little big.”

She shook her head. “You can’t tell. Anyway, it’s good enough for tomorrow.” She smoothed out the shoulders and straightened his tie. “There,” she said. She smiled a little, and he couldn’t tell if her appreciation had grown or faltered.

When Harold woke up the next morning he didn’t remember at first what day it was. Samantha was at the kitchen table, eating pancakes, and he was on the couch with a very heavy and lumpy comforter over him. He looked around with the kind of fresh curiosity of a little boy who still expects marvelous things of the day. Ada was at the stove in the kitchen. “Can you go wake Harry?” she asked Samantha.

Samantha looked over at him. “His eyes are open.”

Ada peered around the corner with a spatula in her hand. “Oh good.” She walked over to him and knelt down, placing her free hand on Harold’s arm. “How are you?” she asked. “How did you sleep?”

Harold blinked and yawned. “Okay.”

“Good. I’m making pancakes. Yours are almost ready.”

He sat down at the table next to Samantha and Ada brought him a cup of coffee. Samantha looked at him and giggled. “Do you know what day it is today, Harry?” He stared back at her, lost for a moment. “It’s Saturday!” she answered gleefully. “That means I don’t have to go to school!”

The cemetery was three blocks away from Ada’s home, but the mortuary where the service was being held was across town. Ada drove. All of the arrangements had been made days before, while Harold had still been in California. “Did your mother have any religious affiliation?” the director had asked him. Harold remembered they had gone to church a couple of times on Christmas Eve and sometimes his grandparents had brought them all to Mass, but these had seemed more convention than any kind of religious observance. “No,” he said. “Maybe if you could just say some kind of prayer.”

There wasn’t anybody there really, just the funeral director and another employee, some of his mother’s old friends from the art class she had taken at the community college, Harold in his borrowed suit and Ada and Sam in her little striped dress. Someone else, an older man in a tweed jacket, showed up about halfway through the service, but he left before Harold could go talk to him and thank him for coming.

They followed the hearse in Ada’s old Geo Metro, past the street she lived on, to the cemetery where their family was buried. Harold stood stock-still as the casket was lowered into the grave. To the right was Harold’s father, behind them his grandparents, and Ada’s mother and father were nearby, as was Lew, with a plot reserved next to him. Harold played the cuff of his jacket. He shifted his weight and shoved his hands in his pockets and felt something, a slip of paper or a card. Next to him Ada was crying a little.

It’s a curious phenomenon of some ceremonies that they’re over much sooner then you would have expected. As they were walking back to the car Harold thought he spotted the old tweed gentleman again through the trees, but he couldn’t be sure, and he didn’t really care that much. Maybe the man was an old lover of his mother, maybe just someone looking for a funeral, but Harold decided to leave him in peace. He reached into his pocket and felt the slip of paper again and pulled it out.

It was a ticket from the dry cleaners. There was the date, almost four years old, and a total at the bottom, and stamped across it the words, “Payment due when services rendered.”

Ada was walking alongside him, holding Sam. “What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” said Harold, shoving the ticket back in his pocket, Lew’s pocket. Lew’s suit. He could tell Ada was watching him and he tried not to look at her. He remembered once his mother had said to him, “It doesn’t matter how old you are, Harold. When your parents die you still feel like an orphan.” It hadn’t been long after her own mother had died. His mind reeled with the symmetries, the parallels of what death can turn you into, and he had to stop for a moment to catch his breath.

That night they ordered pizza and rented a couple of movies and finished off the bottle of wine. Samantha fell asleep during the second movie and Harold, who had still not taken off the suit, draped the jacket over her. It seemed the least he could do.

The following morning Ada drove him to the airport and dropped him off out in front. Samantha was in the back sleeping and Ada said she’d say goodbye there. She said she didn’t like goodbyes. She said, “Let’s just pretend you’re running in to get us some breakfast and then I’ll just drive off.”

“Okay,” said Harold.

“Samantha likes the chocolate donuts with the sprinkles on top,” she said. “Don’t forget the sprinkles.”

“Okay,” he said again.

Through the windows he watched as she drove off. After checking in, he stopped at a coffee stand and bought a cup of coffee, a bear claw and a magazine, and then he sat down at the gate and tried to sleep, but there were people next to him talking. He remembered that he had forgotten to give Ada some money to have the suit dry-cleaned. In the pocket of his jeans was the ticket.

Eventually they called his flight and he got up to board. He found a seat by the window and looked out at the scenery, the empty fields and farmland and property scheduled for development. He thought of his bags then and wondered where they were, but the plane had already taken off. Harold was already in the air by the time his bags were landing back home.