He didn’t mean right then and there, but Olivia immediately knelt down, her blue skirt pooling around her like a puddle of water, and undid the clasps on the suitcase, resulting in an explosion of cosmetics and shoes and bras and phone chargers. A bottle of shampoo rolled over to rest against Graham’s shoe and he nudged it until it rolled back.
“You see,” he said, “you’re better off buying stuff like shampoo and lotion in Kentucky, or taking really small bottles. And why are you taking a jar of pennies and that little Statue of Liberty figurine—”
“What am I going to do?” Olivia interrupted, nearly wailing.
“Let me get my gym bag,” Graham said. “And I think I have some shopping bags, too. We’ll figure it out.”
She looked up at him and nodded, her cheeks as pink as a Dresden doll’s.
He went into his office and dumped his gym stuff onto the floor of the closet there. When he returned, Olivia was still kneeling by her open suitcase, looking like someone who’d just been evicted from a very crowded apartment.
She had her cellphone to her ear and Graham guessed she was speaking to her roommate. “Yes, a hundred dollars!” she said. Then her eyes fastened on Graham. “I don’t know how he knows this stuff, he just does.”
He felt—just for the tiniest instant—very wise, very old.
—
You could bet Graham wasn’t going to choose the frying pan. That was certain. But what would he chose from Elspeth’s apartment? He was due to meet Mr. Perkins at Elspeth’s apartment in an hour. He went into the kitchen to say goodbye to Audra, but she jumped up immediately from her seat at the table.
“Of course, I’ll come with you, darling,” she said cheerfully. “It’s bound to be upsetting. I wouldn’t want you to be alone.”
Clearly Audra just wanted to have a good poke around Elspeth’s apartment, but it didn’t seem worth arguing about. She wore jeans and a white blouse embroidered with flowers around the neckline. Why was it that everything she wore lately struck Graham as inappropriately lighthearted?
They left Matthew at home alone. This was a new development and Matthew tended to call them on their cellphones and say things like, “I’m thirsty. Do you think I should get a drink of water?” But, hey, progress is progress. It gave Graham hope that Matthew could live independently by age thirty-five or so.
He and Audra took a cab down to Elspeth’s apartment and met Mr. Perkins in the lobby. Mr. Perkins wore a checkered blazer that made him look like an elderly bookie. Graham said hello and avoided the doorman’s eyes. Did they remember him?
“Well, I’m sure Graham will start in the kitchen,” Audra said to Mr. Perkins in the elevator. “So let’s you and I just have a little mosey around.”
Mr. Perkins looked a bit startled but he just said, “Certainly.”
“I can’t wait to look in her closets,” Audra said in a soft, happy voice.
Graham didn’t have any intention of starting in the kitchen. As soon as they got to the apartment, he went straight to Elspeth’s bedroom. He was looking for the drawer. Everyone had one, at least he assumed that. A drawer, or maybe a box on your closet shelf, where you ended up storing things of sentimental value. Graham’s own such drawer was the bottom drawer of his desk. Audra’s, oddly, was in the kitchen, and in addition to some letters and photos she treasured, it held bits of string and stretched-out rubber bands and spare batteries of uncommon sizes. (How like Audra to have everything mixed up together, the priceless and the useless.)
Graham opened the door to Elspeth’s bedroom. It was immaculate as always. It looked so much like a showroom that Graham had the sudden conviction that if he pulled back the bedspread, he would find only a bed-shaped piece of Styrofoam beneath it.
He steeled himself and stepped into the bathroom. Nothing there. But what had he expected? A pool of blood on the floor? A chalk outline of Elspeth’s body? He didn’t even know if there had been blood. Who came and cleaned up after someone died at home? It was something he’d never thought of before. Who knew death left so much garbage behind for others to take care of?
A silky lavender robe hung on a hook behind the bathroom door. Graham lifted its folds to his face and breathed deeply. It smelled of soap and maybe hair spray, but it didn’t bring Elspeth to mind the way he had hoped. He went back into the bedroom.
“Just look at this linen closet!” Audra said admiringly from the hall. “Everything folded and stacked so neatly. God, these towels look brand-new. Some of them are brand-new—I can see the tags! All this stuff is just in perfect condition. Where do you suppose she kept the old ones?”
“Old ones?” Mr. Perkins said.
“You know,” Audra said. “The faded or torn ones. What did she do when the dishwasher overflowed? Just run out and throw a brand-spanking-new towel with a scalloped edge on the floor?”
Mr. Perkins said something inaudible.
Graham opened the drawers of the nightstand on the side of the bed closest to him. Hand lotion, nail clippers, notepad, pen, phone charger, lip balm. This was not what he wanted. The drawers of the nightstand on the other side of the bed were completely empty, which was somehow even worse.
Audra was still marveling over the linen closet. “This makes me want to go home and replace all our towels. We have towels older than Matthew. We might even have towels older than Graham. My mother was the same way. In fact, when I got married, the very morning of the wedding, we had all these relatives staying with us and my mother put out the nice new towels for them, and I—the bride—had to use a thin little towel that still smelled like the cat and the cat had been dead ten years by then.”