Brady grabs the first black bag off the roll. He shakes it, pulling the top open and holding it out. I fill it with my mother’s clothes. Then we move onto the next one, and the next one. Brady stops for a moment, pulling his phone from his back pocket and turning on music. As we work, we listen to the top forty, and Brady sings along quietly with most of the songs.
After a while, we are surrounded by heavy-duty black bags meant to hold lawn trimmings. I sink down onto the bed, looking at the bags all around us.
Brady sits down beside me. He takes my hand, winding it through his own. I rest my head on his shoulder, taking in his warmth, his clean scent.
“Is there anything you’re keeping?” he asks.
Keeping something has been in the back of my mind as I inventoried her things. I recognized items as I went through them; the red necklace she wore with a white pantsuit, her gold elephant cuff, the diamond earrings Ted gave to her one Christmas. I’d keep the diamonds, but he gave them to her, and I want no part of him on me.
“I haven’t come across anything yet. Pretty much everything you see is going to a women’s shelter.”
“And the furniture?”
My lips twist as I realize how much work this all is. In the midst of thinking about my mother’s stuff, I hadn’t even considered the furniture.
“Salvation Army, I suppose.”
“You should sell it. Get some money from it.” Brady's shoulders shake with silent laughter. “Consider it restitution.”
I laugh quietly along with him. It’s amazing that I can find his comment comical. All the hurt, all the pain, all the years of trauma, have been reduced to this empty house, and me going through the artifacts of a life someone left unexpectedly.
“Did she have a will?” Brady asks.
I lift my head from his shoulder, turning to look at him. “I’m not sure,” I answer, shaking my head slowly. It’s a good question. Why haven’t I thought to ask this before? I really am awful in this situation. I feel like I’m scrambling to catch jars falling off a shelf, but there are still jars sitting up on the shelf, waiting to fall, and I don’t know what’s in them or when they’ll come tumbling down.
“Have you looked through her desk? That’s probably where a will or other important documents would be.”
I picture her desk downstairs, in the small room off the kitchen. It’s a depressing room. I never could understand why the builder put a window in the room if the only view you have is of the block wall. Someday, when I have a home, I’m going to have an office that overlooks my back yard. There will be green grass and flowers. It will be everything this house is not.
“I’ll look through it another day.”
“Nervous about what you’ll find in there?”
Extracting my hand from his, I wipe it on my thigh. The room is warming up as the sun beats in through the windows, and it’s making me sweat.
“I guess so. The more I go through everything, the more I realize I never really knew her. It feels like I’m going through a stranger’s belongings. Sure, I recognize her things, but there’s nothing I'm looking forward to finding. It’s not as if she has a box of pictures from high school that she keeps in the top of her closet, and I’m excited to look at them again because it’s been years since the last time. There isn’t jewelry she always wanted to pass down to me.” As I say it I look down at my bare fingers, then touch my naked wrists.
“You would know that for sure if you found her will. Assuming she had one.”
“I think she did,” I say slowly, a memory trudging up through the murky waters in my mind. “I feel like I remember her and Ted meeting with a lawyer when we were in high school.”
The memory is vague; a quick announcement of where they were going, a short wave of her hand as she walked out the front door.
Brady stands up from the bed. “Your best bet is looking for it in that desk. If you don’t find it, maybe you can at least find a lawyer’s number.”
He reaches down, grabbing my hand and pulling me up alongside him.
“You hungry?” he asks, rubbing his free hand over his stomach in a circular motion.
“I make it a practice never to turn down food,” I joke, following him out of the room. He walks ahead of me, and I watch him. I’ve always loved his confident stride, his easy gait.
“My mom would like to have you and Finn over for dinner tonight,” Brady says when he’s halfway down the staircase.
I’m stunned, pausing on the second stair and reaching for the rail to steady myself. “What?”
Brady reaches the bottom and turns around. “I know. It’s bizarre. Maybe she’s turning over a new leaf.”
“Maybe she’s had a bit too much of that brown firewater they keep in the fancy crystal decanter.”
