For each other.

For the children we might tell about all this someday.

We were becoming the ones who remember.

Chapter 13 — The Last Load

The house emptied faster than either of us wanted it to, once we were doing it together.

That is the cruel arithmetic of clearing a home: the work you dread goes quickest, and then it is done, and then the house is just rooms.

The estate-sale company came and took the furniture, and the recliner went, and the kitchen table where I had learned my multiplication tables went, carried out by strangers to a truck, and I had to go stand in the backyard while it happened because I could not watch the table go.