After his wife left him, Macon had thought the house would seem larger. Instead, he felt more crowded. The windows got smaller, the ceilings lowered, the furniture seemed bigger The house itself was very ordinary, standing on a street of similar houses in an older part of Baltimore. The rooms were square and dark, shaded from the hot summer sun by tall trees outside. Their son Ethan's old room was very neat, as tidy and ordered as a room in a Holiday Inn. Sarah's personal things like clothes were all gone, of course, but it seemed that other things could be personal too. Her sun chair, for example. Macon looked at it, and wondered how an empty space could be so full of a person. He could almost smell her sun oil, and see the reflections in her dark glasses. ell, you have to carry on. You have to carry on. It was a chance to reorganize, he told himself. You had to have some kind of system to run a house, and Sarah had never understood that She was the sort of woman who put plates of different sizes in one pile, and who ran the dishwasher with only five forks in it He started keeping the kitchen sink full of water at all times As he finished using each dish, he put it in the sink. Every other day he let the water out, and put in very hot water. Then he put the clean dishes in the dishwasher, using it as a cupboard He found a way of doing his laundry that saved water. He took his shower in the evening, and put the day's dirty clothes underfoot, walking up and down on them in the water from the shower. He sewed sheets together to make what he called body bags, which made it quicker and easier to make the bed Sometimes he wondered if he was going too far He imagined Sarah watching him, with a smile in her eyes. He tried to remember the early years, the good times, but it all came back