I had braced for it the way you brace for a needle.

What I felt was lightness.

Not happiness — I want to be exact, because for about a year afterward I felt guilty about this — not joy, nothing like it.

It was the specific physical sensation of having put down something you have been carrying for so long that you had stopped experiencing it as weight.

I sat in the car in the county lot for about twenty minutes.

Then I drove to my parents’ house, where my children and their entire lives were currently stored in eleven boxes in my father’s garage, and my mother had made soup because that is what she does, and my father carried three boxes out to the car without asking me one single question about the morning.