I finished the novel. It was good. I kept it.
Daniel came for three days in late January to go through his things — the things that were specifically his, childhood items and a few pieces of furniture he’d been asking about. He was competent and organized about it, which I had not expected. He made decisions quickly. He did not spend a lot of time on sentiment. Whether this was how he managed grief or whether grief was working in him in ways I couldn’t see, I didn’t push on.
There was one afternoon when we were both in the kitchen sorting through a cabinet and we worked alongside each other for about half an hour without much conversation, and it felt like something that might have been normal, in a different family story, in a different set of years. It felt like siblings.
“She kept everything,” he said.
“You know how she was.”
“I found the drawings.” He meant the elementary school drawings, the ones he’d mentioned at the eulogy. I had found them first, weeks earlier, and put them aside for him. “How did they get in the back of the closet?”
“That’s where she kept things she wanted to keep but didn’t know where else to put.”
He looked at the folder of drawings. His expression was private.
“I didn’t visit enough,” he said. Not to me. To the drawings.
I didn’t answer. It was true and he knew it and nothing I said would improve on that.