He nodded. He looked like he’d expected that and maybe thought it was fair.
SELLING THE HOUSE AND REBUILDING
The house went on the market in January, four months after my mother’s funeral.
By then I had gone through every room. That took longer than I expected, partly because of the volume of things accumulated in seventy-eight years, and partly because of the thing that happens when you sort someone’s belongings after they’re gone: you keep finding them. A handwritten grocery list in a drawer. A birthday card from twenty years ago. The folder of Daniel’s elementary school drawings, still there, just like he’d said in the eulogy.
I kept some things. I took the kitchen table, which I had eaten at thousands of times. I took her reading chair. I took the folder of drawings, because Daniel would want it and he couldn’t know about it until he did.
I donated most of the furniture to a local organization that furnishes apartments for families coming out of transitional housing. Getting permission to do this required a signature from Daniel, who gave it without complaint. Two volunteers came with a truck on a Saturday morning and took most of what I’d boxed and tagged. The house felt like itself again after that, clean and empty, like a sentence with all the words taken out.
I had been apartment-hunting for most of that same period. The math of my situation was not comfortable but it was workable. The estate settlement would give me the $22,000 roof advance repaid plus a portion of the net proceeds from the house sale. I had been putting away what I could from the part-time bookkeeping work. I was not going to be flush, but I was going to be okay, which was a phrase I had to work on accepting at face value.