Fanny’s unit was bright and neat, with a small balcony that looked over the beach and the ocean. Her old house in Rochester had been full of beiges and browns, touches of mauve, but here everything was peachy pink, pale blue, pale yellow—a kind of celebration of where she had ended up. Driftwood-colored coffee table and end tables and hutch. Even the photographs of her late husband, various nieces and nephews, Vicky’s family as well, had been reframed in seashells and coral.

Vicky rolled her suitcase across the tiled foyer and saw immediately that her novels were prettily displayed, two on the coffee table, three stacked neatly beside a nautical ceramic lamp.

She said with a laugh, “You didn’t have to put those things out,” but Fanny assured her they were always there. “I tell all my friends about you,” Fanny said. “I tell them I don’t know how you do it. I can’t even stand to write a letter.”

The guest room was all sea green and sky blue. Everything looking new, everything matching, meticulous. Vicky’s mother, Rose, was, had always been, a slapdash housekeeper at best: jumbled drawers and crowded coat closets, unfolded laundry always in some inappropriate place—on the dining-room table or in a kitchen chair, halfway up the staircase. Dishes in the sink and the worn arms of an ancient sofa. 

Rose sometimes implied that Fanny’s early widowhood was the impetus for her immaculate home.

“Women who vacuum constantly,” she’d claimed, “have something missing from their lives.”

And then she’d demonstrate, miming a woman pushing a vacuum back and forth: as crude a gesture as Vicky’s sweet mother ever made.

Fanny’s history was a sad one, even without the tragic voice her mother adopted whenever she recalled it. In Vicky’s own version of Fanny’s story, it was a cautionary tale about reproductive freedom, an anecdote she usually told to remind her smug female grad students or forgetful peers about what being a woman had once entailed.

And yet, to recall Fanny’s past now, in her own bright present, here in her pretty, pastel condo by the sea, was to acknowledge, surely, that time heals, that hearts are resilient, that the past fades, loses its sting.

Reason enough, Vicky believed, to avoid any recounting or reordering or even precise rendering of Fanny’s story in her own writing, lest the fictionalized version of Fanny’s life end with a shrug or—even more unfairly somehow—uplift.

Rose and Fanny had met at church as young wives, newly arrived in their newly built postwar development of three-bedroom homes and narrow lawns and long driveways, all of it carved out of what had once been mere woodland. Fanny was an assistant librarian at the nearby grammar school. Rose was a part-time secretary at an insurance company storefront. Both their husbands, Fanny’s Tom and Rose’s George, were working at Kodak, and both couples were waiting to add their own children to the tiny hordes that were already populating the winding streets of their cul-de-sac-rich neighborhood.

Everyone got along famously from the start, as Vicky’s mother told it, and soon enough the two couples had established regular Friday-night double dates and summer trips together to Lake George.

Rose was pregnant first—Fanny was the one to drive her to the hospital when her water broke—and had already given birth to two more before Fanny finally had her good news. In the Kodachrome photos her father took at Vicky’s little brother’s christening, Fanny was radiant in a pale lace maternity dress, holding Mark, her godson, in her arms.

Not long after this, as Vicky’s mother told it, something went wrong. Severe pain in the middle of the night, sudden high fever. Rose and George drove Fanny to the ER because Tom was at a sales conference in Boston. She was writhing in pain—not contractions, Rose was certain. Hot to the touch, her fever was so high.

A choice had to be made quickly: which one to save.

“Well, Fanny, of course,” Rose told the doctor but it was not her decision to make. It was Tom’s. The hospital would not perform an abortion without his permission and Fanny, in her delirium, could not remember where he could be reached.

A series of frantic calls were made. George waking up Kodak colleagues or catching them on their way out to work to see what they knew. By the time they found the name of his hotel, Tom had checked out. A loudspeaker at the conference center paged him four times before he distinguished his name amid the booming static.

Waiting for word, Fanny, as Vicky’s mother told the tale, promised God that if he spared her life, she would adopt an orphaned baby to make up for the loss of this one.

“Give me my wife,” Tom told the doctors from a pay phone inside the conference center. “Save her.”

A hysterectomy followed the abortion.

No matter, Fanny said as soon as she was out of the hospital. She had already begun the paperwork. They would adopt.

All went well. She and Tom passed every hurdle. There was a three-week-old boy ready to meet them, but the adoption day was put off, briefly, when Tom came down with the flu.

Fanny set him up in a living-room chair with a blanket and a cup of tea and a box of tissues. She was just going to run over to the school, where she was now an assistant to the principal, to arrange a few last things before she left the job for good. Left it for full-time motherhood.

When she returned to their neat little house in that neighborhood of young and growing families, the television was still on—a soap opera, not the morning news program he’d asked for. She could hear the fraught voices as she came in through the kitchen, the overdone organ notes.

She started to make a joke about him sneaking “the soaps” when she looked around the corner and saw how his left leg had fallen from the hassock, how his arm and shoulder had fallen from the back of the comfy chair. When she reached him, he was cold to the touch.

She called an ambulance and then she called Rose. Rose pulled up to Fanny and Tom’s house before the medics did. Fanny, as Rose told it, was standing at the end of the driveway, her coat on but unbuttoned, her empty hands and open palms held out before her like a lawn-ornament Madonna.

This was in mid-February. There were puddle-shaped scraps of snow across all the lawns of the neighborhood. The lawns themselves were winter beige. The driveways mostly empty and the streets quiet: husbands at work and children at school. Fanny moaned softly as Rose took her in her arms. And it had seemed to Rose—or so she told the story—that Fanny’s wordless grief was merely the echo of a more terrible sound, something that had already passed through the whorled cul-de-sacs, rattled the upright mailboxes, left the landscape bare.

Of course, no one would let a new widow adopt a child.

As her mother told it, Fanny never asked God for anything else after that.

But she lived in the house she and Tom had bought as newlyweds for forty more years. Vicky and her brothers thought of it as an extension of their own—a calmer, quieter, more orderly extension where there were always unusual snacks awaiting them: the cream sodas and Mallomars her parents thought too sugary, salami and black olives and sesame breadsticks because Fanny’s mother was Italian. There were pets, too. Fanny always had a sweet dog of her own and one or two she was “minding” for friends, always a few cats, once a litter of kittens she was busy finding homes for. Always a caged parakeet or canary.

Fanny was at their own house for every one of Vicky and her brothers’ milestones and any holiday she didn’t spend with her sister in New Jersey or her brother in Utica.

And when George retired, Fanny traveled to Florida with George and Rose to look for a house. Then found this place for herself.

Vicky sometimes wondered if any of them recalled the terrible morning of Tom’s death when George and Rose arrived at Fanny’s little house for the last time, six years ago now. The three of them beginning the drive to Boca, to their new lives. Fanny was standing, as she had stood then, at the end of her white driveway, with a single suitcase and a rolled sleeping bag—she had spent her last night in the house on the floor of her bedroom—only this time, her hands were not empty. She held a cold bottle of champagne in one and three plastic flutes in the other.

Fanny climbed into the backseat, full of fun, as her mother described it. She made them all drink a toast before they pulled away.

“And then we’ll stop somewhere for coffee,” Fanny said.  “And a bathroom.”

Vicky showered in the sea-foam-green guest bath. She changed into shorts and a T-shirt.

She wondered: In fiction, what possible meaning could be derived from a denouement that, after so much pain, brought Fanny—Aunt Fanny when she and her brothers were young—to this immaculate beachside condominium only a short walk from the couple who had shared with her, warmly, generously, even gratefully, the rest of their lives? Something about the courage to go on. 

But surely you couldn’t walk through a single thin wall of this high-rise condominium and not encounter an aging Florida couple, a Boca widow or widower, a salamander-skinned divorcée or spinster or stubborn bachelor in pastel clothes who had not found the courage to go on. 

The cold caveat to even Fanny’s tragic history being: Honestly, what choice?