My name is Ruth Dawson, I’m seventy-three years old, and I live alone in a modest stucco house in a quiet gated community in Naples, Florida, where the December air stays warm enough for shorts and the only snow you’ll see comes from spray cans at the Publix grocery store. The house smelled like roasted turkey and cinnamon candles that Christmas Eve, with my artificial tree standing tall in the corner, its branches heavy with ornaments Ray and I had collected over forty years of marriage—ceramic Santas from craft fairs, seashell angels from Sanibel Island, a glass ornament shaped like a golf cart that Eddie picked out for his dad when he was ten years old.
