George’s cancer was an acceptable reason why his wife, Lisa, was so depressed.
Why she was depressed, why she cried, why she was distracted.

But Lisa had become depressed the day she learned Timmy was seeing Lora.

Timmy was one of series of yardmen George ‘hired’ over the years. 

They had move to Sandy Bay when George was forty three and Lisa twenty.
Aware of ‘the runnings’ George chose to befriend and ‘hire’ young male vagabonds
to look after the property.  He’d give them a bed, food, cash, teach them to drive,
treat them like family.

In this way, the vagabond would ‘defend’ the house.  He would be a security guard
chasing other vagabonds, he would be a gardiner, making hiring one unnecessary,
and he’d be the one to teach his sons how to play ball or ride bikes or swim.  For
George was born old, and only ideas fascinated him.

Timmy was the sixth in a series, each one reaching a ‘moving on’ level.

Moving on because of age, because they proved they couldn’t be trusted, because
they just couldn’t absorb a level of civility.

Timmy had come when he was a ragged twenty, and good food and security turned
him into a very attractive twenty five.

Lisa was forty, George sixty three, and where she still had that spark of youth
George was closer to eighty.

The affair could have been meaningless, but Lisa fell in love with Timmy.
Timmy appreciated Lisa.  Where she could take him, what she could buy him,
and how she let him drive her car as ‘chauffeur.’

Cora was twenty two, a neighbor.  And nature took its course. 

It hit Lisa so hard because she couldn’t mourn.  She couldn’t admit her heart
was broken, nor express her anger at Timmy, who blithely moved across the street.

Fortunately, George became ill so  the pain of Timmy’s betrayal, all humiliation
in loving a man half her age, all of it could be presented in a neat package of
wifely worry for her husband.

George didn’t die.
He took time recouperating.
He was not an easy patient, hadn’t been an easy husband. Now he was even
more demanding.  The pressure on Lisa was insufferable.

There was Timmy and Cora, being a young married.  Here she was, with an older sickly
man whom she never ought have married.  A man who might be able to buy her things
but could never give himself.  Never give himself, never recognise her needs, assuming
that the gift of a car made up for insults, coldness, late nights, complaints.

As if fate was punishing her for the one brief taste of love, her life became harder,
colder, more empty.

And just as George’s cancer had given her the chance to mourn, the hurricane gave
her the chance to die without it being called suicide.