He Finished the Crossword After He Died

The Sunday crossword was ours — mine and my grandfather's, a fifty-year tradition for him and a twenty-year one for me, the two of us at his kitchen table with the paper folded to the puzzle, arguing amiably over anagrams. He did it in pen, always, in a small confident hand, unbothered by mistakes because he rarely made them.

He died on a Saturday night, in his sleep, peacefully, the kindest version. I was the one who let myself in on the Sunday morning — I had a key, I came every Sunday — not yet knowing, expecting the smell of his coffee and finding, instead, the still house and, eventually, upstairs, the truth.

I did not go into the kitchen properly until later, until the practical horrors of the day had been dealt with and I was alone in his house waiting for someone to collect me, hollow, and I sat at our table because it was where I always sat, and the paper was there, folded to the crossword, where he'd have left it Saturday evening for us to start together on the Sunday. Our ritual: he'd fold it and leave it out, and we'd begin fresh together in the morning.

It was not fresh. Three answers were filled in. In pen. In his small, confident hand — I know that hand better than my own; I have decades of Sunday crosswords in it. Three answers, in his writing, correct, that had not been there when he folded the paper and left it out on Saturday evening, because we always started it together, empty, on the Sunday, and he had never once filled a single square in advance, in fifty years of doing it, because that would spoil our beginning.