As the sun began its electric-orange ascent, Etta Hanson sat on her front porch swing and sighed. She stared down the street at the other houses, small and tidy, that resembled her own, and wiped away more tears. She blew her nose and tossed the pale pink tissue atop the others in the waste can beside her.

She looked at the soft pinks and whites of her prized flower garden and prayed for the next phases of grief to set in quickly so she could get on with a normal life again. But it had been only two days since she'd buried Randall, and she didn't imagine, after fifty-one years of being with him, that the process would be very speedy.

He'd been the world's best husband. And she wasn't the only one who thought so. Her family and friends loved Randall from the first day they met him and told her as much when he proposed.

He wasn't good looking, certainly. He was skinny and not particularly tall or short, and his hair was an odd shade of orange-red that, as he aged, became a color no one could describe as anything but "butterscotch."

But he was funny and playful and never one to let life weigh him down. How many times had she heard him say, "Etta, let that go. You can do that weeding tomorrow." Or "Come on, you beautiful creature. I'm going to show you off on a walk into town and then buy you an ice cream." But Etta would always say that she'd never enjoy anything fun if her house weren't in apple-pie order first.

She took solace in the fact that he went quickly and while doing something he loved: playing ping pong. And she was also grateful that he'd been with his best friend, Herb, and not her or any of the grandkids at the time of the heart attack. But now that all the formalities of his passing were done --the wake with so many beautiful eulogies from his friends, the church service, the graveside prayers-- it was time for Etta to navigate without her True North, as she'd always called him, and somehow stay the course on her own.

Three  houses down, at the corner, a car's taillights sizzled red, and then its passenger door opened. A hooded head bent low and then an arm holding a sack appeared for the briefest of moments before the door slammed shut. The taillights became two dull cherries again, and the car sped away.

Etta scowled at the gall of people who would get up at sunrise to dump their garbage on someone else's street. She clucked her tongue and, brushing the bottom of her freshly ironed housecoat into place, made her way to the offending deposit. She stopped short when she realized the sack was moving, and gave it a hard stare to determine the contents. But when she heard a high-pitched melancholy mew, her feet took flight.

The cord around the opening was knotted too tightly for her to untie it without scissors, so Etta scooped the burlap sack into both arms and raced back to her house. The cries from inside the bag became higher and more frenetic with each bustling step Etta took. When she set it onto the floor in her living room and snipped the cord, creating an opening for the creature within, all that ventured out was a tiny front paw, splayed and fearless, batting at the air. Etta's heart fluttered.

She dangled the severed cord back and forth across the opening, and the paw ventured out again, but this time it swiped the air with a fully extended forearm. Etta dragged the tether along the floor from the bag's opening to where she was kneeling nearby, and, at last, out sprang a fluffy whirling dervish with butterscotch stripes.

"Randall!" Etta exclaimed and held the kitten to her heart.

She set out a small bowl of milk for him and watched as he hunkered down in front of it and purred while his tiny tongue flurried in and out. Then, with round, green eyes, he looked up at her and licked off the last of the white bubbles from his chin, his whiskers arcing up and down in the process.

Her entire married life, she'd wanted a cat, but Randall had been severely allergic, so that was never an option. That's how she knew he'd sent this bundle special delivery just for her, and she cried at how, even in death, her husband was still not missing a chance to be sweet to her.

The phone rang but, as Etta answered it, she saw the kitten launch himself onto the draperies. "No Randall, no!!" she shouted into the receiver.

"Oh, Mom," cooed Deirdre.

But before she could console her any further, Etta said, "I can't talk right now, Dear. I have to help Randall."

Deirdre hung up and, with eyes dark and skittish, said to her husband, "Oh, Lou, it's worse than I anticipated." She called her sister, Colleen, and said, "I'm worried Mom's losing it."

"We have to give her time to adjust," said Colleen with the same words and inflection as the grief counselor they'd been seeing. Then she added, "Remember - it's a process."

Sylvia and Betty, Etta's friends since grade school, called, too, to cheer her up and suggest outings. But Etta's response was becoming both predictable and unnerving: "Let me call you back. Right now, I need to tend to Randall." They worried but felt it important to give Etta her space. She was nothing if not a doyenne of common sense and order, this friend they'd spent a lifetime respecting. They felt certain a woman as capable as Etta Hanson would find her way back in due time.

Etta's days became filled with one rambunctious escapade after another. Randall scaled one of the library stacks in the den and wedged himself into immobility behind a set of encyclopedias, and the only way Etta had managed to find him was by following the scratch marks he'd left on each and every shelf along his climb. Yet before she could fill them in with wood-colored wax, Randall was off to another adventure.

One day, he'd needed help disentangling himself from the pull-cord on the venetian blinds. When Etta followed the sounds of his imploring cries that time, he'd been swinging like Tarzan from one side of the picture window to the other, raising and lowering the blinds with each pendulous sway. His heart felt like a tiny pulsing stopwatch when he'd nestled into her palm after being rescued.

Randall's favorite time to play was at night, so Etta found herself accommodating even that disruption to her ordered routine. Within a month, she was playing with him through the night and then sleeping, with him on her pillow, past noon every day.

On Wednesday, en route to their monthly Bridge luncheon, Betty and Sylvia drove by the weedy shambles that had once been Etta's gorgeous garden and gasped. Her morning newspaper still lay on the dusty brick pathway to her front porch. They felt sick with worry.

"It's only been five weeks," the other bridge partners offered when the women relayed their findings. "Everyone mourns differently. We mustn't rush her."

It wasn't until Etta missed her bi-monthly hair color appointment at the Dyeing for Attention Beauty Salon that Colleen felt the need for an intervention-style gathering of her mother's loved ones. The beautician had called Colleen when Etta was a no-show for her twelve o'clock appointment.

"I woke her up!" the girl relayed, frantic. "And when I reminded her about her touch-up appointment, she told me, 'Randall loves me exactly the way I am, LuAnne, so I'm letting my hair go au naturel from now on.'"

"My mother is letting her roots grow out?" Colleen had gasped, holding the edge of her desk to keep from falling to the floor. "This is an emergency!"

To Colleen's surprise, Uncle Herb had volunteered his house for the meeting. "Should I kidnap Mom and bring her along?" Colleen asked with the conspiratorial whisper of a B-movie spy.

Since she'd been old enough to talk, Colleen had enchanted Herb with her Get It Done Efficiently And By The Rules personality, identical to her mother's, and this moment was no different.

"No, this will be a strategy meeting, Sweetheart," Herb advised in his Calm Doctor voice.

"Ten-four," replied Colleen.

That night, although the grief counselor said she would be willing to start the meeting, Herb stood up and gave the woman a smile. "May I?" he asked, and she deferred to him warmly and at once.

"As you know," he began, "Randall and I were best friends our entire lives. Close as brothers. He even died right here in this house during a game of ping pong." He gave a wan smile. "Not an hour before the heart attack, he was talking about how he always felt bad that, because of him, Etta couldn't have a cat. He had no idea that someone had dropped a box full of kittens outside my office door that same morning because they probably figured a vet could find them good homes."

The women were fidgeting a bit and giving him looks of perplexity and impatience. It was obvious how eager they were to talk about Etta and figure out a way to help her through this time of blackness and sorrow.

"So, two days after Randall's funeral, I had my assistant drop one of the kittens off early near her house, knowing that Etta would be out on the porch swing, watching the sunrise."

At once, all five women became silent and motionless and gave Herb their undivided attention.

"Now, unlike all of you, I've actually seen Etta since the funeral," he told them. "She's been in with that kitten --once for his shots and then twice more just to visit-- and I can tell you that although, yes, it's true she's nocturnal now and not fussy about how things look, the way we've always known her to be, she and little Randall are living life to its fullest every single day."

The guests sat a moment, stunned and incredulous. Colleen withdrew a pale pink tissue from her handbag and began to cry. "I'm so relieved to hear this, Uncle Herb," she said and wept some more. "I was so worried about her!"

"I was, too," Deirdre said, her voice thick.

Betty and Sylvia blotted away tears, too, and then hugged as the grief counselor gave Herb an admiring smile. She slid her notes back into her portfolio.

"So listen," said Herb. "I'm wondering, now that you're all feeling so relieved here, if you can spread the wealth a little. Anybody willing to take home a butterscotch-colored kitten? I still have four left!"

                                                                                                         ******

Randall folded his front paws under himself and watched intently as Etta maneuvered a vintage play pen from the attic.

"I used to put Colleen and Deirdre into this when they were little and I needed to work in the garden," she told him. "This canopy netting for the top that used to keep mosquitos off them will be the perfect way to keep you from getting out. We'll both get some fresh air and sunshine and, after I've pulled all the weeds that have taken over out there, I'm going to hoe a brand new section of the garden."

Randall sidled up to Etta and rubbed his head back and forth against her shin.

"We're going to plant catnip today, Randall," Etta said. "Rows and rows of catnip. And then, when we're done, we'll call Colleen and Deirdre to come over and admire our work."