“No. I shouldn’t have.”
The agreement hurt because it did not contain an excuse.
They stayed on the low wall until people stopped passing through the gate in clusters. Aaron missed the ride he had planned. Nathan ignored two calls from the borrowed car’s owner.
The final page of the letter contained instructions about ordinary things: where she had left a spare key, which neighbor should get the ceramic planter, which cousin would pretend not to want the blue serving dish and should receive it anyway.
At the bottom, she returned to the tin.
USE IT BEFORE YOU’RE TOO OLD TO ARGUE ABOUT WHERE TO GO.
Nathan rubbed his thumb over the sentence.
“She thought we’d still argue.”
“She knew us.”
Aaron folded the pages carefully.
They did not take the trip that week.
First they had a house to empty.
Aaron had eight days of leave remaining. He had planned to spend two of them at home and the rest anywhere else. Instead he put his bag in his old bedroom and stayed.
The house smelled like dust, hand cream, and the faint medicinal scent he associated with his mother’s final months. Nathan moved through it efficiently, carrying boxes, labeling bags, deciding what to donate.
Aaron followed until the efficiency began to feel like another wall.
“Do you need me to do something?”
Nathan pointed at a closet. “Coats. Keep, donate, trash.”
Aaron opened the door.
Their mother’s winter coat hung at the front.
He touched the sleeve and could not move.
Nathan returned ten minutes later and found him in the same place.
“You okay?”
Aaron almost said yes.
The word had been trained into him by years of not wanting conversations to expand.
“No.”
Nathan leaned against the doorway.
“Me neither.”
They sat on the floor among shoes and storage boxes.
Aaron told him about arriving after the hospital room was empty. He had walked into the room anyway. The bed was stripped. A nurse had offered him a plastic bag with a comb, a pair of socks, and the paperback their mother never finished.
“I kept thinking if I’d come twelve hours earlier, the room would’ve had her in it,” Aaron said.
