The right axis is did a hand I loved touch this ten thousand times, and by that measure a magnet outranks the china and a joke mug outranks the clock, and my mother’s handwriting on a recipe card is worth more than anything in that house that could be sold.

We let the valuable things go to strangers and kept the worthless ones that were, to us, the only things in the house that had ever actually been priceless — the objects worn smooth by the daily touch of the people we would now spend the rest of our lives missing.

We split the photographs.

We each took a few small things from the box marked the children. And we let the rest go, because you cannot keep a house, you can only keep each other, and we had, against every odd, just barely managed to do that.

Chapter 14 — Fran’s Table