“Your father was looking through the drawers earlier.”

“For what?”

“Financial papers, I suppose.”

She said I suppose and smoothed her hair behind both ears, and I kept wrapping cups.

Here is what I want on the record about that kitchen.

My father did not know which cupboard had the tea towels.

He had come into that house every second or third Sunday for fifty-eight years of his life and he stood in the doorway that morning and asked Susan where the bin bags were.

And he had been through every drawer looking for an account book.