I sorted the boxes of books on my porch over two weekends in October, Lily helping, the two of us building piles: keep, donate, shelter. The shelter pile was the biggest. Ruth said they could always use books.
Estelle’s boxes I went through by myself.
She’d kept things with the care of someone who understood that objects hold meaning and that meaning shouldn’t be lost carelessly. A small stack of recipes clipped from newspapers and magazines and folded into the same particular square, clearly by the same hands each time. Photographs of people I didn’t know and never would. A bundle of letters tied with twine that I left unread, since letters tied with twine are private, and no one had given me permission.
I packed the photographs and letters carefully, addressed them to Albert at the shelter, and dropped them at the post office one Monday morning, hoping they’d reach him and that receiving them would feel, for him, like the right kind of homecoming.
A postcard arrived a week later.
The front showed a winter scene — mountains and snow, the sort of postcard sold in small-town gift shops with views worth marketing. On the back, in Albert’s firm handwriting:
The photographs arrived. Thank you. I had forgotten I still had my wife’s face. I have put the best one on the windowsill.
I pinned the postcard to the board in my kitchen, beside the photo of Daniel I still keep because Lily’s in it, four years old, with her father’s eyes in a way I want her to know about even though everything else about it is complicated. Next to the postcard I added a small note copied from Estelle’s notebook, the line about the things that are yours being yours because of the work, and the work still belonging to you.
The board is filling up.
I don’t think that’s a problem.
The school clothes worked out. A sale came in late August that I’d been watching for, the timing lined up, and Lily walked away with the three specific items she’d deemed essential — the green jacket, the particular jeans, the boots she’d researched with the thoroughness of a professional shopper. She wore the green jacket on the first day of school and was still wearing it when she got home, which I took as a good sign.
