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“No.”

“You went around the house for the jug and came back with a face.”

“I don’t know anything about it, Lara.”

“Neither do I,” Lara had said, and they’d both hung up.

The Hardwick kitchen had a window over the sink now, because Chase had cut one on Sunday without being asked and said it was the only way he’d ever get fed in this house, and the light came through it onto the counter, and the taped box was on the counter, and she was alone with it.

She’d said a Tuesday, a kitchen, nobody watching, and she had all three, and she put her hand on the tape.

It came off easy. She’d thought it would fight her. It had been on there long enough to go yellow and it lifted off the cardboard in one piece with no sound at all, and she stood there with a strip of old tape in her hand and a box open in front of her and didn’t look in it for a minute, because she’d waited a long time and a minute more didn’t cost anything.

Then she looked.

Will’s glasses, on top, in their case, the way Lorna had put them the week of the funeral. His crossword, folded, with the pen still clipped to it, and twenty-two down empty. Lorna’s recipe cards in the tin with the rooster on it, two hundred of them, in her hand, the pie on top because it was the one Sunny had asked for most. A quarter, gone dull, that a charge nurse in Big Spring had bounced off the first bed Sunny ever made right and told her to keep. A photograph of a girl on a porch step at six with a bag beside her and two old people either side of her not touching her yet, because she hadn’t let them yet, and it had taken a year. And underneath, the file. The state’s. Her name on the tab in somebody’s typing, and the six years before the Berrys in it, and then the twelve after.

She didn’t cry. She’d done that in a shower and a hallway and on a bedroll, and she was in a kitchen with a window, and she’d waited eight years to do this, and she did it dry.

She put the glasses on the sill over the sink, where the light was, and the quarter beside them. She put the tin on the counter by the stove that wasn’t there yet, where it would be. She put the photograph on the nail by the door, because there was a nail by the door, an old one, at eye level, that some Hardwick had put there for something, and it was the first thing she’d ever hung. She put the file in the drawer, the top one, and shut the drawer.

She kept the crossword. She sat down on the floor with her back against the cabinet, because there still wasn’t a chair, and unfolded it, and read twenty-two down, the one Will had left with the pen clipped to it in a kitchen in Indianapolis.

Put down roots. Six letters.

She looked at it a long time. Then she folded it back up with the pen still clipped to it and put it on the sill beside the glasses, empty, because it was his, and he’d have wanted to get it himself.

The boxes went flat. All three. She broke them down on the kitchen floor with her hands and stacked them by the door for Chase to burn, and stood in the middle of a kitchen with nothing in a box, and heard a truck come over the cattle guard.

It rained that night on the tin.

She heard it start. She was on the bedroll with him in the room she’d picked, with the window on the south side and no curtain in it because she’d said she wouldn’t need one, and the first drops hit the roof and she sat up.

“There,” he said.

“Shut up.”

“I said it was loud.”

“You said loud. You didn’t say this loud.” She sat there in the dark with the rain coming down on a roof his brothers had put on, and listened to it, and it was the loudest thing she’d ever heard in a house, and she’d have sat there all night. “Brody.”

“I’m here.”

“I like you, you know.”

He was quiet a second. Then he laughed, in the dark, once, with his whole chest, the way he had at a fridge in June.

“That’s the new one,” he said.

“That’s the new one. The old one’s retired. You said.”

“I said.” He got his hand in her hair and pulled her down. “Say it again.”

“I like you.”

“Again.”

“I like you, Brody, I like you, I like the way you read a tank and I like your terrible brother and I like your father in his truck and I like this roof,” and he was laughing, and she was laughing, and he got her over him on the bedroll with the rain going on the tin so loud they couldn’t have heard the house fall down. She took him in fast, because it was that kind. She put her hands on his chest and rode him laughing with the rain on the roof and her hair everywhere.