Part 7
The headboard came through the front door first.
Mike carried the heavier end backward while I walked ahead, one hand on the banister. At the turn in the stairs he paused.
“Do you want me to take the pictures down?”
“No. Tilt left.”
He tilted left. The wood cleared Tom’s Navy portrait by two inches.
In the bedroom, Mike waited while I chose the position. He did not tell me the bed would get better light on another wall or that a different arrangement created more space. He set it where I pointed, tightened the frame, and brought up the box spring. The mattress came next.
“Nightstand?”
“On the window side.”
“Lamp?”
“Leave it downstairs for now. The cord was damaged in the garage.”
Not everything returned unchanged. One of my painted mugs had chipped in storage, and Tom’s recliner had a pale scrape along its leather arm. Brooke had donated the old gray blanket I kept at the foot of the bed; the hook where it had hung remained empty.
Mike carried up the dresser last. When the furniture was in place, he found the blue quilt and laid it across the bed without trying to straighten the edges.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He did not ask me to forgive him.
“Help me make the bed,” I said.
We worked in silence. When we finished, he picked up the empty laundry basket and stopped outside the cedar closet.
“Do you want anything moved in there?”
“No.”
He nodded, picked up the basket, and left the room without touching the closet.
Six months later, Mike lived in a two-bedroom apartment three miles away, close enough for Owen to remain at his school. He was working again and still meeting with the credit counselor. He and Brooke remained separated. She texted before every pickup now, and one rainy morning she returned a carton of my road-trip mugs, waiting on the porch until I told her where to set it. The trust company remained my successor trustee.
On a cold Sunday in February, Mike brought Owen over after breakfast. They found me upstairs with three cartons open on the floor and the cedar doors wide.
“What are you doing?” Owen asked.
“Deciding what we keep.”
He looked alarmed. “All of it?”
“No. Some of it can go.”
Owen sat cross-legged beside the box marked SCHOOL. He laughed at Mike’s kindergarten self-portrait, which had one arm growing from his neck, and tried on Tom’s Navy cap until it fell over his eyes. Mike held each object as if waiting to be told whether it was his.
I gave him his father’s repair ledger.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He ran his thumb along the worn cover. “I’ll bring it back if you want it.”
“I’m giving it to you.”
He set the ledger carefully beside his coat.
Owen wandered to the open doorframe. “Is that Dad’s name?”
Mike joined him. The pencil marks rose through the years: six, eight, ten, thirteen, seventeen. Beside the last one, Tom had written STILL SLOUCHING.
Owen stood with his heels against the cedar. “Can I have a line?”
“You’re taller in shoes,” Mike said.
“Dad.”
“All right. Shoes off.”
Owen kicked them away and flattened his hair with both hands. Mike found Tom’s carpenter pencil in the shallow drawer where it had always been. He rested it against the cedar, then looked across the open closet at me.
Mike waited until I nodded. Then he drew Owen’s line beside his own.