Page 15 of This Is How It Started
“Everything that goes to the Goodwill in this box.” Hannah pushes the large carton she’s whipped together at us. “Everything we’re donating to the library over here.” She points to a second box. “And everything we’re keeping, we’ll line up on the sofa and go through after we finish with the rest of it.”
I suspect there will be a battle over a few of the most sentimental items. The framed photo of my father as a little boy with Safta at a resort that used to be their family’s farm in Moodus, Connecticut. The Rolex my mother bought him with the proceeds from her pearl earrings when he finished med school. And my father’s tweed newsboy cap. Him in that hat is probably my most indelible image of my father. I don’t know where the cap came from, but he’d been wearing it since I was old enough to walk.
Hannah is barking more orders at us, which I can tell puts Adam on edge.
“Fuck off, Mussolini,” he barks back and grabs an armload of the medical books and tosses them one at a time into the carton like he’s shooting baskets. “I doubt Nurse Ratched has a need for any of these.”
Brooke has left us alone, thank God. I don’t think I could bear sorting through the flotsam of my father’s life with her underfoot. It is just too damned personal. By the time she pops her head in to see how we’re making out, I’ve noticed that the painting my mother gave my father is missing from over the fireplace mantel.
“Do you know where the watercolor of the giant redwoods is?” I ask her.
Brooke’s face flushes with embarrassment. It reminds me of the time Josie’s high school boyfriend, Chuck Tillerman, got caught stealing the tip jar at Swensen’s.
“It’s not valuable,” Adam says, and I don’t know whether to laugh or be mortified.
“It’s in there.” Brooke points her chin at the closet and abruptly leaves the room.
I open the closet door to find it wedged between an old set of golf clubs and a pair of crutches left over from when Adam broke his ankle in eighth grade, covered in a thin layer of dust. I gently pry it loose, careful not to rip the canvas, and set it against the sofa with the keep pile.
Hannah looks at me. “For Mom?”
“Yeah.”
She acknowledges the gesture with a slight nod. Her way of saying, “Kudos to you for thinking of it.”
“Is it just me,” she whispers, “or does Brooke look ten years older?”
She still looks like my sister’s age to me; she just doesn’t have makeup on. Her long blond hair is tied up in a messy bun, and she’s wearing glasses instead of contact lenses. Brooke’s fashion choices have never been what you would call overly stylish, but she can rock a pair of jeans and a T-shirt with that svelte body of hers. This is all to say that even when she is slumming it around the house, she has an effortless beauty only found in soap commercials and Tommy Hilfiger ads. But today she does look like she’s operating on little sleep, judging by the dark circles around her eyes and the brackets at the corners of her mouth.
I shrug. “She looks the same.”
We go back to sorting until Adam finds a photo album, and for the next twenty minutes, we pore over the pictures.
“Nice hair.” Adam pokes me in the ribs as we thumb through photographs of my junior high school graduation.
It was before keratin treatments, back when my hair looked like Howard Stern’s.
“Nice jeans,” I shoot back.
“Skinny was in then.”
“Look how young Mom and Dad are,” Hannah says.
The picture makes my heart jump. My parents’ shiny faces staring at the camera. You can feel their love for each other emanating through the lens. Deep and real. The way they belonged.
A wave of melancholy washes over me. If only he’d had more time. They would’ve found their way back to each other, I’m sure of it.
Josh walks in as the three of us, gathered around the album, are caught up in a world of memories. “I see you’re getting a lot done.”
“Come look at this,” I say and wave him over to show him the picture of my parents.
He gazes down at the photograph, then takes me in his arms, where I rest my head against his chest as he slowly sifts his fingers through my hair.
The room is quiet, except for the ticking of the massive grandfather clock near the fireplace. The clock was a rummage sale find that my mother had to have. She spent more money fixing the thing than she did on the clock itself.
Josh breaks the silence. “Give me a job to do.”
“You can load the boxes into the trailer,” says Hannah, who rented a U-Haul and borrowed Stephen’s truck—the one he uses twice a year to tow his boat to Tahoe—so we can deliver the things we’re giving away.
