* * *
I stayed in the kitchen eating my egg salad sandwich while the movers hammered and grunted and yelled at one another in the living room. I didn’t even peek into the room to see how they would take apart the baby grand. Instead, I sat at the small kitchen table, checking my friends’ comments on Facebook. Bryan and I had unfriended each other, but I still went to his page to look at his profile picture every few days, staring at his smile and wondering if I’d made a mistake. He hadn’t changed his picture in the two years that I’d known him. He stood against a pink sunset with his son and daughter, who had been three and four at the time the photograph had been taken and who were climbing up his body like little monkeys. The picture still made me laugh. I missed those kids almost as much as I missed him. Looking at the picture, though, I felt glad of my decision. That was where he belonged. With his kids, and whether he knew it or not, with his wife.
The silence from the living room was sudden, and I could hear voices out on the front porch. I waited until they’d subsided, then walked into the living room, past the Santa Claus look-alike who was still working with the pipes. From the middle of the room, I stared at the enormous empty place where the piano had stood for as long as I could remember, and the breath went out of my body. I pressed my hand to my chest. I was only twenty-five, but I thought this month might kill me. If I was having this much trouble saying good-bye to a piano I couldn’t even play, how would I ever say good-bye to the house I loved?
I dropped onto the couch as Christine trotted down the stairs carrying her iPad. “Whoa, look at that!” she said. “No piano! Mom went with the movers, I guess?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
“The appraiser guy is almost done up there,” she said. “He’s loving those compasses!” She turned to the man at the pipes. “How’s it going?”
He shut his computer. “Just about done,” he said, running his hand over his beard. “I have a few things I need to check at the office, but ballpark figure is seventeen thousand.”
“Wow!” I said, sitting up straighter on the couch. I’d had no idea the pipes were that valuable. Maybe that would take some of the grouch out of Tom Kyle.
The appraiser slipped his computer into a briefcase and headed for the door. “I’ll get back to you with the exact figures and a certificate in a few days.” He spoke to Christine rather than me and I didn’t bother getting up as she ushered him out of the house. Once back in the living room, she sat down at my father’s rolltop desk, sideways on the chair so she was facing me, her iPad resting on her thighs. “How’s the shredding going?” she asked.
“Slowly,” I said. “I’m afraid of tossing something that turns out to be important.”
“Oh, you don’t have to be supercareful,” she said. “I’m sure most of it is tossable.” She smoothed her bangs across her temple and I saw the damp skin of her forehead. The attic had to be unbearably hot to work in and I suddenly felt sympathy toward her.
“Must be challenging, going through someone else’s stuff,” I said. “I feel like I’ve left you a mess, but Jeannie said not to throw anything away except the old paperwork.”
“She was absolutely right,” Christine said, “and I love going through someone else’s stuff, so don’t worry about the mess.” She touched the screen of the iPad. “Mom and I will be in again tomorrow, if that’s okay with you. I know you want to get this thing rolling.”
“The sooner the better,” I said.
“A few items I need to go over with you.” She tapped the screen again. “The computer on the desk in the office upstairs. Does that go?”
I nodded. “It was my father’s. I guess I should clean the hard drive first.”
“Exactly. We can do that for you, but you might want to be sure there’s nothing you need on there before you let us have it.”
“All right.”
“I found keys lying here and there around the house and I put them in a plastic bag and left them on the shelf in that office,” she said. “You should go through them to see if you need to keep any of them. And you should be putting things you want to hold on to in that office, too. Mom knows that room is off-limits, except for the lighters and compasses and instruments, of course.”
“And my bedroom,” I said. “Make that off-limits, too.”
“Of course,” she said. “What about your brother’s old room? There’s nothing in there, really, but would he want to—”
“He won’t care,” I said.
“If we find anything that looks like a personal item or a family heirloom, we’ll put it in the office, too,” Christine said. “How’s that?”
“All right,” I agreed. “I want to keep that one violin, at least for the moment.”
“Lisa’s,” she said. “The one with the violet on the tag?”
“Yes.” I looked up at her. Tipped my head. “Did you know about … what she did?” I asked.
For the first time, I saw a shadow pass over her features. “I was living abroad when it happened and not in much contact with Mom at the time, so I only heard about it later when I got home,” she said. “That was after your family moved down here. I was shocked. I knew Mom felt terrible. She really liked Lisa and wished she could have talked to her. Helped her somehow.”
“It sounds like Lisa was beyond help,” I said.
“Yeah. That happens.” Her bangs had flopped over her forehead again, and she looked at me from beneath them. “Mom told me you didn’t know and you found some articles about it. That must have been a shock.”
“It was,” I said. “It still is.”
“Well,” she said, getting to her feet again. “Hopefully that’ll be the last shock you have as we clean out the house.”