We packed up his things and put them in his rental car. He came back inside for a minute before leaving and looked around the kitchen.
“This was a good house to grow up in,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “It was.”
He hugged me, which he does not do often. I hugged him back.
Then he left and I went back to sorting.
The things I kept were few and specific: the kitchen table, the reading chair, a quilt she’d had since long before I knew her and that had the smell I’d been trying to identify since she died (it turned out to be the specific laundry soap she used, which I found under the sink and which I now use in the apartment, so the smell is still with me), two photographs of her in her thirties that I had never seen before and that showed her laughing at something off-camera with an unselfconscious delight that I think of as the self she was before so much of life happened to her.
I kept the legal pad too. Not the note from it — the note was in the folder — but the pad itself. It sounds irrational. It is a legal pad. But she had touched it and written on it, and there is something about objects that have been used that makes them different from objects that have not.
It’s in the drawer with the folder and the job offer letter.
Some drawers, I am learning, are where you keep the things that are too specific to display and too important to put away entirely.