On Sundays, their husbands would get up early, have a bit of breakfast over the morning paper, then shower, dress, and flip a coin over who would drive to Shallow Pond Links, their favorite golf course, where they would play 18 holes, walking of course, hang out in the clubhouse afterwards over a couple of drinks, telling lies or making excuses or offering one another unsolicited advice about the other’s swing or approach or head angle while putting, arriving back home early enough in the afternoon to shower, turn on whatever game or match or championship was available, before falling asleep on the sofa and waking for early evening cocktails with one another and their wives on one or the other couple’s backyard patio until it was time for Sunday dinner.

            Their husbands were dead and buried now, though, Tilly’s Stan of a brain embolism that struck in the middle of the couple’s quarterly venture up to the bedroom one Saturday afternoon, occurring at exactly the wrong time, Tilly would forever remember but never tell a soul, and Terry, Rose’s husband, who passed just as quickly when he came out of the phone store fumbling with his brand new iPhone early one Monday morning, adjusting the font type and size, apparently, and in his excitement for his new phone, for he’d been waiting for its release since reading about it weeks and weeks before and had become something of a late-age tech junkie since retiring, did not  bother to take his face from the screen to look up and was plowed over by the Number 27 bus heading to the mall, the outlet center by the freeway, and back downtown, before heading out to the bus terminal where the driver would take his lunch break.

            On this Sunday morning, Tilly was fussing over her prized rhododendrons, as always, eight different varieties carefully laid out and manicured nearly to the point of topiary, loudly slapping her well-worn Vermont Vermonter gloves each time she stood up, while Rose was sprawled out on her chaise lounge, hiding from the world behind large dark glasses and a floppy hat that drooped down as if it were wet, a sweating vodka and Diet 7-Up in her hand, hoping that Tilly would not want to talk about the cable company’s tunnelling fiber optic under her backyard or how close they might have gotten to her prized rhododendrons or worse rehashing how they both had become widows within six weeks of one another and the special bond it created between them, when for decades they’d only tolerated one another for their husbands’ sake.

            Rose got her wish, and when Tilly felt ignored long enough, she slapped her Vermont Vermonters once more, before heading back into her kitchen with a bouquet of six of her eight rhododendron varieties, leaving Rose to contemplate how her entire body ached in the most delicious way after her dinner date and familiar sleepover with John Silverman the night before.