Every so often I’d catch him glancing toward the kitchen, toward me, as if he were keeping track of where I was in the house.

I chalked it up, at the time, to his usual restlessness.

Lonnie had never been able to sit in a hard feeling; even as a boy he’d get up and leave the room when things got heavy.

So when he pushed to have the whole house cleared in two days — before the casseroles the neighbors brought had even been finished — I thought it was just Lonnie doing what Lonnie did, running from the weight of it.

Only later, sitting in a bank, would I understand that the thing he most wanted cleared out of that house in forty-eight hours, before I could sit with it or look too closely, was up on the highest shelf of the pantry in a chipped enamel tin.