Will

Will, Tova Sullivan’s late husband, is portrayed through the domestic routines and remembered details that outlast him. Cancer and its treatment shaped the final period of his life, but the memories Tova carries are not confined to illness: they include picnics at Hamilton Park, shared errands, the family’s ordinary evenings, and the small acts of care that made a house feel inhabited. After his death, these recollections give the past a physical presence in Tova’s daily life while also showing how much of her grief remains bound to familiar habits.

Identity and Illness

Will was Tova’s husband, and he was undergoing cancer treatment before his death. Chemotherapy sometimes left him nauseated and awake in the middle of the night. During those hours he watched horror films on cable television, a detail Tova recalls while greeting the wolf eels at the aquarium. The connection is pointedly domestic: the eel’s jagged teeth and frowning underbite recall the films Will watched, but Tova still greets the animal politely. Her memory of her husband accompanies her into work without displacing her attention to the creatures around her.

Near the end of Will’s treatment, he saw a specialist at the University of Washington and received an experimental drug. It did not help him much, but Tova remembers that they had to try. That brief account places medical uncertainty within the history of their marriage: treatment offered a possibility, but not a remedy that changed the outcome. The recollection also explains why driving to Seattle later feels charged for Tova. Her last remembered trip there was made for Will’s care, so the route carries the residue of a time when she accompanied him through another attempt to keep him well.

Marriage and Shared Routines

Before Will became sick, Tova packed picnics for the two of them: cheese, fruit, and sometimes a bottle of red wine with two plastic tumblers. At Hamilton Park, they would climb down to the beach when the tide was low, sit beneath the seawall, bury their bare feet in coarse sand, and let the cold, foamy water wash around their ankles. The modest outing is recalled through its concrete arrangements and sensations rather than through grand declarations. Its intimacy lies in the repeated preparation and the shared place.

Will also accompanied Tova to the grocery store sometimes. He habitually chose the slower checkout line, and the couple joked that he had a knack for selecting it. The routine returns in Tova’s memory of the afternoon Erik died: she and Will had gone shopping and bought a box of the cream-filled snack cakes Erik liked. From that ordinary errand, Tova imagines alternative versions of the day—whether a faster line would have brought them home sooner, whether they might have seen Erik before he left for work at the ferry dock, and whether he might have told her about Daphne. The questions are Tova’s, not answers the story supplies; Will’s remembered choice of checkout lane becomes one small detail around which her unanswerable speculation gathers.

Fatherhood and the Empty Place

Will and Erik shared a taste for loafing through televised sports. They would sit in the den for hours watching football, baseball, or whichever ball game was in season. Afterward, Tova vacuumed potato-chip crumbs from the seams of the davenport and wiped the water rings left by sweating soda cans from the coffee table. Her recollection captures a household rhythm in which Will and Erik relaxed together while she kept busy with the work left behind.

After Erik was gone, Will continued to watch games from his usual cushion, while Erik’s place remained empty. To Tova, his unchanged routine was irritating: he seemed to lounge as if nothing had changed. The contrast does not establish that Will had forgotten or accepted the loss; it shows how differently their habits appeared to Tova as she responded to grief by keeping busy. A seat could remain familiar while its meaning had altered. Will’s continued use of his cushion and the emptiness beside him make Erik’s absence visible in the everyday life of the den.

Habits That Remain in Tova’s Life

Tova’s work also holds traces of Will’s illness. When she first began cleaning at the aquarium, the green cleaning solution irritated her nostrils, made her dizzy, and left streaks on the floor. Most privately, its smell reminded her of Will’s hospital room and of him being sick. She did not tell Terry, the aquarium director, that part of her objection. Instead, she argued from the product’s effects and appearance, then agreed to bring her own supplies when Terry let her use whatever she wanted. Her nightly vinegar and lemon oil thus reflect a practical solution, but the memory behind her preference remains unspoken.

Years later, at Ethan Mack’s house, Tova notices a record collection covering an entire living-room wall. The shelving veneer is peeling away from the particleboard, and she thinks that if the place had been theirs, Will would have tacked the loose laminate down. She resists picking at it herself. This remembered repair is small, but it gives Will a distinct place in Tova’s image of a shared home: he is associated with noticing what has come loose and fixing it. The contrast between the unfamiliar house and the home she once shared with him briefly brings that old domestic partnership into the present.

Narrative Significance

Will’s characterization is assembled from what Tova remembers in passing: the hospital smell she keeps private, the familiar sports cushion, the grocery-store joke, and the picnic made for two. These details show grief recurring through ordinary objects and routines rather than through a single extended account of loss. They also preserve contradictions in Tova’s recollections. She loved a life of shared outings and practical companionship, yet Will’s apparent continuation of his habits after Erik disappeared frustrated her; she remembers the intimacy of their care and the burden of watching illness shape their days.

At the story’s later turning point, Tova realizes that Cameron Cassmore is her grandson and thinks of Will: if only he had been there to meet him. The distance from Modesto, more than a thousand miles away, sharpens the absence. Will cannot take part in the new family connection that has emerged, just as he cannot share the life Tova is now rebuilding. His significance rests in that double presence and absence: he belongs to the marriage and family history that formed Tova, while the future opened by her grandson makes clear that he is no longer there to witness it.