It wasn’t every time she opened the pantry that she saw it. It was in a plastic box with all the orphan beverages that were never drunk at family gatherings or by friends popping over for the weekend from Portland.

Hardly needing it anymore, still she kept the not enlarge bottle of prune juice. It had been three and a half years since she’d been recategorized as a widow. Her dead husband had used it in his feeding tube, part of a healthy concoction that kept him alive nine years from the onset of The Big Bad.

Everything else had been given away two or three years before: clothes, philosophy books, medical equipment, giant bags of protein powder, a blender and a shower chair. Their many pictures together slowly moved from view around the house to a few special ones from their wedding in Africa and their early days in college, now resting quietly in the dusk of her walk-in closet.

In fact, if a visitor didn’t know she’d been married, nothing in the house would reveal that fact any longer. Unless she was asked about the history of the years she was half the duet of their couple-hood. Over forty years, each would repeat, voice rising with an eyebrow.

Yet there the prune juice bottle stayed. Its pretty purple and yellow label was an orchard of dark crimson plum illustrations, ripe fruit shining under an orange sun. It had girth, sixty-four ounces of it, the juice safe and snug inside under the yellow lid hard hat.

Not once had she checked the dead date. The occasional reorganization of the box would resurface the prune juice bottle, bringing forth the question of whether she should “chuck it.’ Even the kitty sitter’s dead-date sticky notes, politely left on old items in her pantry, never prompted her hand to reach for it.

It has to be past the dead-date, she would think each time the colorful label peeked up through old seltzer cans and the fruity beer no one liked. She didn’t bend down.

Even his ashes were almost out of the house. Most of him in a shiny, black marble box in a small grave with the headstone he’d asked for years before, when death was still hypothetical. Other tiny vials of ashes had been scattered in places he’d loved: Africa, Paris, warm Caribbean seas and the Oregon Coast near the dream house he barely lived in.

Only one small vial remained, waiting for a trip to another place where his history had unfolded in the shadow of no one else. He was that type of man. In his youth some wanted to follow him, his raw authenticity drawing them in. Knowing they were lost and he was not their prophet, he’d move on to the next place that would carry him forward.

Until he found her. Wise in her naivete, an old soul in a young woman, he knew he could stop then. Not stop his search for truth and purpose, but in thinking he had to cross all those lines of longitude to find it.

People always said to her that their relationship was incredible and other hyperbole that she wondered about. Was their partnership so transparent to others? Did others see how their glances vibrated with a constant intensity, boring into the other’s eyes, recharging the spark of new love even years later? She thought they were unreadable. But then her practicality banished the ego from such musings, and all their foibles would rush to the fore.

Then a few years after his death, palm trees and days floating in the blue waters of the tropics with an old friend, a male friend, had awakened something. Unable to peg it down, she simply reveled in the temporary luxury of the warm Hawaiian breeze.

It must have been the algebra of the last night: the rustle of palms in a breeze as light as a bubble; a meal so delicious it made her a wild lioness, the sweet cocktails washing aside judgment, shaking up a lighter perspective. And then that old feeling of romance hitchhiked in.

Winter’s reality met the new lovers and their plane, so they cautiously drove back to their coastal homes in the deepening snow. As always on her returns, the kitty sitter chatted away for an hour as the cats rubbed against her leg, vying for the attention of their awol human.

Oh, the kitty sitter had said halfway out the storm door, the woman thinking only that her hot bath would be delayed further. I had to throw out the prune juice in the pantry. It was starting to ooze out the cap. I sort of cleaned it up.

Nodding, she mumbled a thank you, said see you soon, and shut the door. Immediately checking the garage bin, she saw the empty prune juice bottle amid dirty paper towels, carrot peelings and an empty bag of ginger snaps. The juicy, purple plums on the label had dulled, their color poured down the drain with the juice.

She slowly opened the pantry door and stared at the box where the prune juice had lived for four years. Only the old seltzer and fruity beer remained, fresh dead date stickers from the kitty sitter adorning their tin tops.

Her breath sucked in, she shut the door, shoulders sagging. It had been such a long trip, heavy and confusing. But the prune juice was gone now. Only a deep brown ring in the bottom of the box where it had rested.

That would stay, for another while. It had no dead date.