I have a vague memory of his desperate face as I droned on and on and on. I was watching myself, like I was hovering outside my body, but I couldn’t do a thing to stop myself. “I’m thirty-three Gaz, thirty-three today, and my husband is dead and I’ll have another martini because if you can’t have a martini when your husband is dead when can you have one?”

I continued in this vein for some time. I half noticed a glance being exchanged between Gaz and Rachel but it was only when Rachel got to her feet and said overcheerily, “Anna, I’m coming over to you. I haven’t had a proper chat with you all night,” that I realized that I was an object of pity and people were almost paying bribes in order not to sit beside me.

“I’m so sorry, Gaz.” I grasped his hand. “I can’t help it.”

“Hey. Nothing to be sorry about.” Tenderly he kissed the top of my head, but then he nearly broke into a run. Seconds later he was sitting at the bar, knocking back an amber-colored liquid in one frantic slug. His glass hit the polished wood, he said something urgent to the barman, the glass was being refilled with the amber-colored liquid, then it was down the hatch in another single swallow.

I knew, without having to be told, that the amber-colored liquid was Jack Daniel’s.

54

I woke on Saturday morning with a horrible hangover. I was trembly, tearful, and in terrible pain. The arthritis/rheumatism-style aches were far worse than usual and the shooting zips of electric pain felt like my bones were on fire.

I was also swollen-tongued with thirst.

Old impulses die hard. I wanted to nudge Aidan and say, “If you get up and bring me some Diet Coke I’ll be your friend forever.”

Images of the previous night flashed through my head—pictures of me getting people into headlocks and doing long slurred monologues on mortality—and I cringed with mortification.

Briefly, my shame mingled with defiance. I had told Rachel I couldn’t handle people; I’d warned her. But the shame won and I had no one to tell me that I hadn’t made a drunken show of myself the night before, that I hadn’t been so bad really…

He used to be so nice to me whenever I was hungover.

“I wish you were here,” I told the empty air. “I really miss you. I really, really, really, really, really, really, really miss you.”

In all the time since he had died I had never felt more alone and the memory of what I’d been doing this time last year was almost unbearable. I’d had such a lovely birthday.

A few weeks before it, he’d asked me what I wanted to do and I said, “Let’s go away. Surprise me. But it must be someplace that doesn’t involve cosmetics. Or antique shops.”

“You don’t like antique shops?” He sounded really surprised and he was within his rights. I had made him spend at least two Sundays on the upstate “antique route,” all of it overrun with couples just like us.

“I tried.” I hung my head. “I really tried, but I like new clean modern things, not smelly old yokes riddled with woodworm. One more thing,” I’d added. “I don’t want to go too far from New York. I can’t take the Friday-night gridlock.”

“Orders received. Over and out.”

A few weeks later, on the night itself, he’d collected me from work in a limo (just a normal one, not a stretch, thank Christ) and was so secretive about our destination that he actually blindfolded me. We drove for ages and I thought we must be in New Jersey at least. I had a sudden dreadful fear that he might be taking me to Atlantic City and I began to claw at his arm.

“Nearly there, baby.”

But when he took the blindfold off, we were still in New York: about twenty blocks away from our apartment, to be exact. Outside a hot SoHo hotel, with a day spa and a restaurant with a three-month waiting list, unless you were hotel guests, in which case you automatically jumped the queue. I’d done a product launch there about four months previously and had come home raving about its beauty. I’d always wanted to stay there, but how could I when I lived five minutes away?

As I climbed out of the car, I nearly got sick with the thrill of it. “This is where I want to be more than anywhere else in the whole world!” I told him. “I didn’t even know how badly I wanted it until now.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.” His tone was mild but he looked like he was going to burst with pride.

We had dinner in the fabulous restaurant then we spent the next two days in bed, only emerging from between our Frette sheets to do a quick foray to Prada. (I’d decided to skip the day spa, just in case they tried to sell me products.) It had been truly magical.

And now look at us…

Drunk as I’d been last night, I had picked up on the mood around the table: She’s as bad as she ever was, they’d all been thinking. Worse, even. Funny, you’d think that after five months she’d have got it together a bit…

Maybe after five months I should have got it together a bit? Leon had improved noticeably. He was a lot cheerier and he could be in my company without crying. Mind you, he had Dana; he hadn’t lost everything.

Another image from the previous night popped up: me talking to Shake about the next air-guitar championship heats.

“Play,” I’d urged him. “Play your heart out. Play with every fiber of your being, Shake. Because you could be dead tomorrow. Later tonight even.”

He and his hair had been nodding eagerly along with me but he’d recoiled speedily when I mentioned the possible imminence of his death.

Rachel had kept moving me along, from person to person, before I wrecked anyone’s buzz too much. But I suspected I’d engendered a bit of a panic because after the dinner, as we’d stood outside, deciding where to go next, the Real Men were drunkenly punching the air and hollering that the night was young and that they were going to parteee (play Scrabble) till the sun came up. Even short, neat Leon was tilting his head back and yelling at the sky. They were all in a howling-at-the-moon, grab-life-by-the-balls frenzy.

“I spooked them,” I said out loud. “Aidan, I spooked them.” And suddenly it seemed funny—and comforting. Me and him were in it together. “We spooked them.”

God only knew what they’d got up to: I hadn’t stayed around to watch. With my arms filled with gift-wrapped scented candles—everyone bar none had given me one as a birthday present—I’d peeled away quietly, light-headed with gratitude at escaping a big “the bereaved woman is leaving early” scene.