"Do you?" Diane asked softly. "Intend to live afterward?"
Helen looked around the wood-paneled living room — at the drapes, at the carpet where the late-afternoon light still fell in amber bars, at the place on the sofa where Diane had stood and said the house on Maple does not go to you. "I intend to try. That will have to be enough for now."
The week before the house went on the market, Helen walked every room alone at dusk. She started in the attic, where Christmas ornaments waited in tissue paper and a box of Diane's elementary-school art still held a clay ashtray Diane had made for Robert in second grade though neither of them smoked. She held the ashtray and laughed once, a sound like a hinge. She carried it downstairs and set it on the mantel beside the photographs, a small absurd monument to a child who had loved a father without knowing the footnotes.
In Diane's old bedroom, the wallpaper border of tiny sailboats remained, yellowed at the edges. Helen sat on the bare mattress frame and remembered reading Charlotte's Web aloud here while Robert's footsteps moved through the hall — present, reliable, the footsteps of a man who would later keep a post office box like a second heartbeat. She did not forgive the footsteps. She also did not pretend they had never soothed a child to sleep.
In the master bedroom, she opened Robert's side of the closet, already mostly emptied, and found a single tie she had missed — navy with small green dots. She had given it to him for their thirtieth anniversary. He had worn it to Diane's college graduation. Helen pressed it to her face and smelled only cardboard and time. Then she folded it into the donation bag with a gentleness that felt like the opposite of surrender and exactly like it.
On listing day, the realtor — a brisk woman named Patty who specialized in what she called "sensitive transitions" — walked through with a tablet and a stream of suggestions. Hide the personal photographs. Bake cookies before the open house. Consider painting over the pencil marks on the doorframe. Helen said no to the pencil marks. Patty, to her credit, did not argue. "Buyers like history," she said. "Just not too much of it."
Helen almost told her that too much history was the only kind this house had left. Instead she smiled the smile she had practiced at the grief group and said, "We'll bake the cookies."