had faded and the rectangles underneath were brighter, like ghosts.
The kitchen calendar was gone. He had been hanging on the phone for eight years. Every Thursday there was a little VS written on it in its perfect cursive. I used to see it and feel something I couldn’t name.
I kept trying to move things that were no longer there. I went to lift the picture frames of the piano, and there was no piano. I went to straighten the guests’ towels, and there were no towels. I went to check the sticky drawer, and the drawer was empty, and it opened without sticking at all, because someone had finally fixed it.
It was me. I repaired it two years ago. With a bar of soap on the runners.
Mrs. Whitaker was there. She was sitting on one of the two chairs she had kept, at the small round
table in the kitchen by the window. She didn’t read. She didn’t drink her tea. She just sat there and watched me work.
By two o’clock, I was finished. I put my supplies back in my bucket. I carried him to the front door.
Then I removed the brass key from my keychain. The one she handed me eight years ago in that same kitchen. Don’t lose it. I hadn’t done it. Not once.
I handed it to him.
She took my hand instead of the key.
She closed my fingers around it, one by one. His hand was thin, dry and fresh. She held on.
“Not yet”, she said. “Come back Saturday. Eleven o’clock.”
“Do you need me to clean up after the movers?”
“No.” She let go of my hand. “And leave your supplies at home.”
I must have looked confused. Because she looked at me over her
reading glasses, like she did from day one, and said:
“I ask you to come visit you, Carly.”
I didn’t know what to wear.
This seems silly. But I stayed in front of my closet Saturday morning for twenty minutes. Every pair of pants I owned had bleach stains. Each shirt was a T-shirt, or a sweatshirt, or the purple polo shirt I wore to the dentist.
