Chapter 2 — Two Lists

He was in the kitchen when I came in, sitting at the table with a legal pad and a cup of coffee, and he looked up at me the way you look at weather you’d hoped would hold off.

“Janet,” he said.

“Terry,” I said.

And that was the whole of our reunion.

He had made a list.

Of course he had made a list; Terry had been making lists his whole life, the responsible one, the one who stayed.

The legal pad was headed ESTATE and divided into neat columns — keep, sell, donate, ask J — and I understood, looking at it, that he had already been through the whole house alone, room by room, deciding, and that the ask J column was short, and that this was both a courtesy and an accusation.

“I figured we’d go room by room,” he said.

“There’s a estate sale company that’ll take most of the furniture.

House goes on the market in January.” His voice was flat and efficient and I recognized the flatness, because I use it too; it is the family voice, the one we both learned from watching our father hold himself together at funerals.

“That’s fine,” I said.

“Whatever you’ve set up is fine.” We stood there in the kitchen where we had eaten ten thousand breakfasts, two middle-aged strangers who happened to have the same dead mother, and I thought: this is going to be unbearable, and it is going to take a week, and there is no way out but through.

The strangeness of it is hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t stood in it.