My son watched her do it—and this was my first birthday without my husband.

Winter broke early that year. By the middle of February, the Carolina yellow jessamine was climbing the garden trellis, its small trumpet-shaped blossoms scenting the evening air with a clean, wild perfume.

I hired two boys from the local high school agricultural program to help me reconstruct the stone patio. We pulled up the flagstones where the lemon cake had fallen, dug out the grease-stained sand beneath, and laid fresh granite chips from the quarry in Salisbury. We rebuilt the fire pit, lowering its iron rim so it sat flush with the ground, surrounded by a border of smooth river stones Arthur had collected from the French Broad River during our trips to the mountains.

I didn't hire a decorator. I didn't change the curtains. I simply scrubbed the heart-pine floors with lin-wax until they glowed with that deep, honey-amber light that comes only from eighty years of footfalls and Carolina sunlight.

Once a month, an envelope arrived from the New Hanover County Clerk of Court.

Inside was a cashier's check for three hundred and forty-two dollars and sixteen cents. It was Harrison’s garnish. I didn't deposit them into the household checking account. I took each check, endorsed it, and deposited it into a separate, restricted savings account at the state bank—the account Arthur had opened when Harrison was born, the one designated for "Tools and Education."

In late April, a small wooden crate arrived on the porch.

There was no card, no return address, only the Wilmington dockyard freight stamp on the pine slats.

Inside, nestled in wood shavings, was a hand-turned rolling pin made from a piece of recovered river-salvaged cypress. It was heavy, perfectly balanced, the grain of the wood spiraling like dark honey through the pale sapwood, finished with three coats of food-grade walnut oil. The handles were turned with small, neat grooves that fit precisely into the palms of an older woman whose wrists sometimes ached when the barometer dropped.

I laid my palms against the wood. It was cool, smooth, and smelled faintly of the sawmill and river water.

I took the rolling pin into the kitchen and set it on the marble pastry slab beside Arthur’s bread bowl.

Martha came by that afternoon, her apron already tied around her waist, carrying a basket of fresh mint and a carton of organic eggs. She stopped at the counter, picked up the cypress pin, turned it in her hands, and looked at me across her spectacles.

"That's good wood," she said.

"It is," I said.

"Cypress doesn't warp when it gets wet," she remarked, setting it down with a soft, solid click. "Takes a lot of seasoning to get it that straight."