Page 98 of Now That It's You
“It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you.” Chloe stared at her, seeming to decide something. “Before you go, why don’t I have you take a look at one more thing.”
“What the hell is this?” Kendall set aside the top to a cardboard banker’s box and peered inside, a mystified look on her face. She lifted the box onto Meg’s coffee table as Meg peered over her friend’s shoulder.
“That would be the Halloween mask Matt made out of papier-mâché roughly nine years ago,” Meg said. “And a bunch of notes from a photography seminar he went to in Dallas the year after we started dating. And those look like movie tickets from—” she grabbed the stubs, frowning down at them. “I have no idea who he would have seen Pocahontas with ten years ago, but it must have been significant.”
“Good Lord. How did I never know you were marrying such a packrat?”
Meg shrugged and pried the lid off another box. “It’s not like he advertised it. He was weirdly sentimental about stuff. He wasn’t very organized about it, though, so he’d collect all these trinkets and tokens and then just shove them in boxes and forget about them.”
“Where the hell did he keep all the boxes?”
“The garage, when we lived together,” Meg said. “Chloe made him keep them in the attic. Apparently she needed the room to store all her bikes and workout gear.”
Kendall shook her head as she scanned the boxes.“This is nuts.”
“We’ve got three dozen of them to go through, and I’m guessing they’re all like this.”
“Good thing I made Bloody Marys.”
“Amen.” Meg took a sip of hers and began pawing through her own box. There was a program from a play he must have seen a year or so after they’d split up. A pack of chewing gum with three pieces missing. A tiny blue piggybank with a crack down one side, a relic from some other period Meg hadn’t been privy to in his life.
She spotted a printout she’d given him from a page on the Humane Society website, and she pulled it out, skimming more closely. It was a cat she’d hoped desperately to adopt when they’d first moved into the house together, but Matt had insisted he was allergic to cats. She couldn’t for the life of her think of why he might’ve kept these pages, creased and faded with age.
“There’s nothing in here but junk,” Kendall muttered.
“I know,” Meg said, setting the paper aside. “But look at it all anyway, just in case.”
“Here’s an electric bill from 2007.”
“I’m sure he paid it at some point. He was always good about that. Just not at throwing things out.”
She continued digging through the box, pushing aside broken pens, a bottle cap, a Tyvek race number he must have worn for a competition during the era he’d taken up triathlons.
Meg spotted a paperback of e. e. cummings poetry in the bottom of the box. Nostalgia washed over her, and she scooped it up, breathing in the familiar scent of the used bookstore she used to frequent before Matt bought her an eReader for her birthday.
“I didn’t fancy Matt as a fan of poetry,” Kendall mused.
“He wasn’t. I gave it to him when we got engaged. Thought maybe we could find a poem together to have Kyle read at our wedding.”
“Kyle,” Kendall said, smiling a little at the mention of his name, while Meg flipped through the book. “Did he agree to do it?”
“We never even asked him. Matt thought the poetry idea was stupid, so I dropped it.”
“Funny he kept the book.”
“Don’t read too much into it,” Meg said, dropping the book back into the box. “He also appears to have kept ticket stubs from the Joni Mitchell concert his mother dragged him to in college, and I know for a fact he hated Joni Mitchell.”
“Can I see the book?”
“Sure.” Meg picked it up again and handed it over. Tucking a curl behind one ear, she went back to sifting through the box. “Knock yourself out. I don’t even remember which poem I bookmarked for him.”
“Hmm,” Kendall said, turning a page as her eyes skimmed over the words. “‘A politician is an arse upon’?”
Meg laughed and pushed her box aside, reaching for another. She pried the lid off and began to sort through more junk. “That sounds like one Matt would have liked.”
“How about ‘sonnet entitled how to run the world’?”
