The dead woke Daniel Foster at 5:17 every morning.

Not intentionally. The dead were rarely as demanding as the living imagined them to be. They did not scratch at their drawers or call through the walls. They did not wander the halls with funeral veils trailing behind them.

They rested.

It was the machinery that woke him.

At 5:17, the refrigeration unit beneath the apartment shuddered into another cycle. Its motor gave a low mechanical groan, followed by a vibration that climbed the walls and passed through the legs of the sofa. A teaspoon trembled in the saucer on the end table. Somewhere downstairs, a pipe knocked twice.

Daniel opened his eyes.

The ceiling above him was the color of old teeth.

A water stain had spread another inch during the night. He could tell by the dark crescent extending beyond the pencil line he had drawn around it the previous evening. It resembled the coastline of some drowned country, an irregular continent growing above him while he slept.

He watched it for a while.

The stain did not move.

This seemed a minor kindness.

Daniel sat up and waited for the room to settle around him. His neck ached from sleeping against the wooden arm of the sofa. He had owned the sofa for twenty-three years and hated it for at least ten of them, but hatred was not sufficient reason to replace something that still performed its function.

The bedroom stood at the end of the hall.

Its door was closed.

Daniel looked toward it only long enough to confirm that it remained that way.

He reached for the alarm clock and switched it off thirty seconds before it was due to ring. He had not needed the alarm in years. Still, he set it every night. There were some habits a man maintained because abandoning them would amount to an admission.

The floorboards were cold beneath his feet.

In the kitchen, he filled the coffeepot from the tap and shook yesterday’s grounds level in the filter. There was enough strength left in them for one more morning. Possibly two, though two would be unkind.

The burner clicked beneath the pot.

As the coffee began to warm, Daniel stood at the sink and looked out over the rear parking lot. Dawn had not yet decided whether it was coming. The sky was a colorless sheet stretched above the rooftops. Rainwater filled the cracks in the asphalt, reflecting the yellow security light over the service entrance.

Beyond the alley, the abandoned textile mill crouched against the horizon. Its windows had been broken out years ago, leaving rows of black squares where morning never entered. A freight train moved behind it, slow and heavy, carrying things made elsewhere to people living somewhere else.

The town had once been the sort of place where men returned home with grease beneath their nails and women shook factory lint from their hair before supper. Now the train passed through without stopping.

Daniel understood the arrangement.

The coffeepot gave a wet cough.

He poured the first cup before it had finished brewing, weakening everything that followed, and drank it without cream or sugar. The heat hurt a cracked tooth near the back of his mouth. He shifted the coffee to the other side and continued.

Beside the refrigerator stood a pair of yellow rain boots.

They were small, though not as small as he remembered them. Memory had a way of shrinking the things it wanted to protect.

The boots had collected a pale fur of dust around the soles. Daniel bent down and straightened them, placing the heels evenly against the baseboard. One boot always leaned toward the other. No matter how carefully he arranged them, by the following morning they would be touching again.

The floor was uneven, he told himself.

It was an old building.

Things shifted.

Above the boots, a sheet of paper remained fixed to the refrigerator by a magnet shaped like a strawberry. Three people stood beneath an enormous yellow sun. The woman had red hair, although Anna’s hair had been brown. The little girl wore a triangular blue dress. The man stood farther away, his arms hanging stiffly at his sides.

Wren had drawn seven fingers on one of his hands and three on the other.

Ten altogether.

She had been proud of that.

Daniel opened the refrigerator and removed a carton of milk. He sniffed it, considered what he smelled, then poured a little into the sink.

It came out in lumps.

“All right,” he said. “Point taken.”

His voice sounded strange in the apartment. Not unfamiliar, exactly, but underused.

He threw the carton away and immediately regretted it. The trash bag was nearly empty, and now it would have to be taken downstairs before the milk began to sour. One careless decision produced three additional tasks. That was how lives fell apart.

Daniel carried his coffee into the bathroom.

The mirror above the sink had blackened around the edges, slowly surrendering his reflection to the wall behind it. He examined the part of his face that remained.

Fifty-two had arrived without ceremony. Gray had spread through his beard and gathered at his temples. His eyes looked bruised from lack of sleep. A faint yellow cast lingered in the skin beneath them, though it might have been the light.

He rubbed at the stubble along his jaw.

The razor waited beside the sink.

“Not today,” he told it.

He washed his face instead. When he bent toward the basin, a sharp pain flashed behind his right eye. It came and went so quickly that he froze with water dripping from his chin, unsure whether it had happened at all.

Then came the smell of something burning.

Daniel lifted his head.

It smelled like scorched bread, bitter and dry.

He checked the kitchen. The coffeepot was behaving itself. The stove was cold. He touched the outlets with the back of his hand, then opened the cabinet beneath the sink and inspected the old wiring visible through a gap in the plaster.

Nothing was warm.

The smell had already disappeared.

He added it to the list of things the building had done without explanation.

At six, Daniel dressed for work.

His white shirt was clean but wrinkled. He drew the line at ironing before sunrise. He buttoned it to the throat, knotted a dark tie, and pulled on the black trousers he had hung over the back of a chair the night before.

He slipped his wedding ring from the bathroom shelf onto his finger.

It no longer fit properly. Some mornings it was too loose. Others, it seemed to grip the knuckle. Today it settled into place without argument.

Before going downstairs, Daniel picked up the empty pan beneath the ceiling leak. The bottom was dry.

It had not rained during the night.

He looked once more at the stain above the sofa.

Then he returned the pan to the floor.

The staircase from the apartment descended into the private portion of the funeral home. There were thirteen steps. The seventh complained beneath his weight, and the eleventh dipped slightly toward the wall. Daniel could climb them in darkness without making a sound, but he turned on the stairwell light anyway.

The bulb filled the narrow passage with a weak yellow glow.

At the bottom, the funeral home waited.

Daniel unlocked the door to the preparation room and listened as the building introduced itself.

The refrigerator hummed.

The furnace clicked but did not ignite.

Water ticked into a metal pan beneath the utility sink.

A branch scraped across the roof.

Nothing unusual.

He walked through each room in the same order every morning.

First the preparation room. Then the dressing room. Then the small chapel with its rows of burgundy chairs. Then the arrangement room, where families sat beneath soft lamps and chose between coffins they could not afford.

He checked the front door, tested the thermostats, and emptied the dehumidifier. In the chapel, he found one chair turned slightly away from the others. He corrected it.

The carpet had worn thin along the center aisle. Beneath the front window, the wallpaper had begun peeling from the plaster in a long yellow curl. Daniel pressed it flat with his palm. It remained in place for three seconds before loosening again.

“You and me both,” he said.

In the arrangement room, he tightened a loose screw in the leg of the table. The repair would not last. Most repairs did not. Their purpose was not permanence. Their purpose was to keep something useful for one more day.

His father had taught him that.

His father had taught him other things as well. How to shave a dead man without leaving razor burn. How to close the mouth without making the expression appear strained. How to remove a wedding ring from a swollen hand. How to stand close enough to a grieving person that they did not feel abandoned, but not so close that they felt observed.

The dead require patience, his father used to say.

The living require forgiveness.

Daniel had found patience easier.

He entered the front vestibule and unlocked the main doors. Cold morning air pressed against the glass.

Across the street, the bakery had been empty for six years. A faded painting of a loaf of bread remained on its window. Beside it, the laundromat sign promised twenty-four-hour service, though the building had neither electricity nor a roof.

Daniel stepped outside.

The funeral home rose behind him, three stories of soot-darkened brick, narrow windows, and gutters that sagged under the weight of wet leaves. It had once been a family residence. The Fosters had converted it in 1948, removing walls, widening doors, and teaching every room to accommodate grief.

Above the porch hung the old sign.

Foster Funeral Home

The gold lettering had faded to a tired yellow. From the street, in certain light, the word FUNERAL nearly disappeared. Only the family name remained clearly visible.

Daniel stood beneath it and looked up.

One of the chains had begun to rust through.

He made a note to replace it, knowing he would probably wrap it in wire instead.

At seven twelve, the telephone rang.

Daniel heard it through the front door. He did not hurry. The living often believed urgency could change what had already happened.

He returned to the office and picked up on the fourth ring.

“Foster Funeral Home. Daniel Foster speaking.”

A woman from the county hospital identified herself. Her voice carried the practiced gentleness of someone who delivered bad news often enough to have stopped hearing it.

They had a body ready for release.

“Name?” Daniel asked.

“Margaret Harrow.”

He wrote it on the yellow legal pad beside the telephone.

“Age?”

“Seventy-eight.”

“Next of kin notified?”

“Two sons. One is on his way into town.”

Daniel wrote down the remaining information. When the woman finished, she thanked him as if he were doing her a personal kindness.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

The line disconnected.

For a moment, Daniel remained at the desk with the receiver in his hand.

Margaret Harrow.

Seventy-eight years reduced to a name, a room number, and a time of death written on yellow paper.

It was not much.

But it was enough to begin.

Daniel replaced the receiver and went to prepare the removal cot.

Outside, morning had finally arrived, though the sun remained hidden behind the clouds. The yellow letters above the porch looked almost colorless in the gray light.

Downstairs, the refrigeration unit stopped humming.

The sudden silence seemed to spread through every room in the building.

Daniel stood inside it, one hand resting on the door of the preparation room.

Then the furnace coughed, the pipes knocked, and the old house began breathing again.