Carol’s husband was killed in a car accident last year.

Jim, only 52, was _______ home from work. The other driver was a teenager who had _______ a lot. Jim died at once. The teenager was in the _______ for less than three hours.

It was Carol’s fiftieth birthday, and Jim had two plane tickets to Hawaii in his pocket. He was going to _______ her. However, he was killed by a drunken driver.

“How have you _______ this?” I asked Carol, a year later.

_______   welled up(涌出) in her eyes. I thought I had said the _______     thing, but she said, “It’s all right. I want to _______     you. The day I married Jim, I promised I would never let him leave the house in the morning _______     telling him I loved him. He made the same________ _ . It got to be a joke between us, and as we grew older it got to be a(n) ________ promise to keep.

“I remember running down the driveway, saying ‘I love you’ just before he drove out of my     ________, or driving all the way to his office just to put a(n) ________   saying ‘I love you’ on his car. It was a funny     ________.

“We made a lot of________     trying to say ‘I love you’ before noon every day of our married life.

“The morning Jim ________,he left a birthday card in the kitchen and then left ________. I heard the engine starting. Oh, no, I thought. I________ out quickly and knocked on the car window ________ he rolled it down.

“Here on my fiftieth birthday I, Carol Garret, want you, Mr James E. Garret, to ________ that ‘I love you!’

“That’s how I’ve survived, knowing that the last words I said to Jim were, ‘I love you!’”

Every year on my birthday, a white gardenia (栀子花) was _________to my house. But no card or note came with it. Calls to the flower shop were always _________— it was a cash purchase. After a while I stopped trying to discover the sender’s identity and just _________in the beauty and heady perfume of that one magical, perfect white flower lying in soft pink paper.

But I never stopped _________who the giver might be. My mother _________to these imaginations. She asked me if there was someone for whom I had done a special kindness who might be showing _________. I had more fun imagining that it might be a boy I fell in love with or one who had a _________on me even though I didn’t know him.

One month before my high-school graduation, my father died. My feelings _________from sorrow to fear and anger: my dad was _________some of the most important events in my life. I became completely __________in my coming graduation, the senior-class play and the ball. But my mother would not hear of my losing any of those things. Mother and I had gone shopping and found an impressive dress, but it was the __________size. When my father died, I forgot about the dress.

The day before my ball, I found that dress — in the right size — hanging over the living room sofa. It was __________to me so lovingly. I didn’t __________if I had a new dress or not. But my mother did. She wanted her children to feel __________, filled with a sense that there was a beauty even in the face of __________.

My mother died ten days after I was married. The following year the gardenia stopped coming.