Deborah tries to remember when she had emotionally if not actually disengaged from her marriage to Larry. He probably wasn't even aware of it; she herself may not have been. But disengage she did, once she began to sense that he wasn't going to come through in any serious way, but would instead give his days over to playing with his toys and grousing and brooding on his stunted career. She had her professional life; she had her children. She has long ago achieved independence — financially and in every other way. 

Standing in front of her dead husband's closet, Deborah tries to imagine the kind of husband she might once have wished to have had. That perfect man, kind, gentle, modest, thoughtful, successful, a patient and proficient lover — Deborah realises that he probably doesn't exist. Except for the modesty part, she supposes that, when she first married him, she held out hopes that Larry might turn out to be such a husband. A serious error, she decides, looking into the tired clothes in her Larry's closet. Yet she also decides that in some sick way Larry was the perfect husband for her. She would probably not, with a less neurotically self-absorbed man, have been allowed to live her own life as independently as she has. 

Folding up Larry's shirts for the ORT bag, Deborah wondered why her thoughts about her marriage seem to press so insistently on her just now. Surely, it was better, as the common wisdom had it, to forget all the negative things about the dead and remember only what was best about them. The fact is that, all the while she and Larry lived together, in a busy life she never stopped to analyse their relationship, at least not in a concentrated way. She could live easily enough with letting things drift. Why was it important she make a final, a definite, judgment now? Was she seeking — what was that dopey word? — closure? Whenever she heard anyone talk about "coming to closure", she used to think of "closure" as an expensive spa in southern California. Welcome to Closure. 

Deborah has now folded up the rest of Larry's clothes. She has decided to call in her son Steven, the cardiologist and the only one of her children living in Chicago, to deal with the Franklin Mint and railroad cars and football jerseys, baseball hats, the old records, the CDs, and the rest. She has also decided not to bother with the first edition novels; she'll just give them to the Evanston Library for its next book sale. 

Larry's clothes fit into four shopping bags, and Deborah loads them into the trunk of her Volvo. She feels a sudden urgency to get them out of the house. Driving from her house on Isabella, in northwest Evanston, she takes Sheridan Road, which leads into Chicago Avenue, where, near Main, ORT is. But then, at Church Street, she finds herself taking a left, and driving down to the lake. She parks, illegally, near a pier that divides a small boat launch and a dog beach. No one is at the dog beach at the moment; it is October and too late for small boats to be in the waters of Lake Michigan. 

Deborah removes the four shopping bags containing Larry's clothes from the trunk of her car, and, carrying two in each hand, she walks out to the end of the L-shaped pier. She empties one bag after another into the choppy water. The clothes do not sink but follow the current heading southward, towards downtown, a clear view of whose skyscrapers is available from the end of the pier. Her dead husband's dark blue down-filled coat, spread out in the water, looks, in the middle-distance, like a raft. She takes one last look at the clothes bobbing and floating away, gathers up the four empty shopping bags, and heads back to the Volvo. In the car, she turns on the ignition, looks into the rear-view mirror to check what the wind out on the pier has done to her hair, and discovers she is smiling. Not her usual, deanly, official, welcoming smile, but a smile with a slight smirk, and a touch, maybe just a touch, of the vindictive to it.