PART 1
It happened the morning after we buried him.
Seventeen years after my parents dropped me at that house and disappeared, they came back.
Not with flowers. Not with condolences.
Not one of the three of them had been at the funeral, which I want on the page early, because people assume they were.
With a moving truck.
Booked. Paid for. Two men in it who were being charged by the hour and who had been told, I found out later, that it was a house clearance for a deceased relative.
Which is a true sentence if you squint at it, and which tells you exactly what was said on that telephone.
My sister climbed out behind them in oversized designer sunglasses, on a grey morning, with no sun anywhere in that county.
She looked past the black funeral wreath still hanging on the front door.
She glanced up at the second floor — at the windows, working out which room was which from the outside.
And she smiled.
She said, to nobody in particular, in a voice meant to carry: I call the master bedroom.
My name is Calliope. I am twenty-two. He was called Thackery and he was seventy-nine years old.
I was standing on the porch in one of his old flannel shirts holding a cup of coffee I had not touched.
I had been standing there since about half past six.
Because I had not slept, and because the house was quiet in a way it had never once been in seventeen years.
The house still smelled of funeral lilies and wet autumn and the dish somebody had brought on the Tuesday.
There were four arrangements in the hall and nobody had thrown any of them out yet, because throwing them out is a decision and I had not been able to make one since Thursday.
And underneath all of it, that trace of pipe tobacco.
He gave it up ten years ago, the week after a doctor told him to, with no discussion and no fuss, which is how that man did everything.
It never left his coat pockets or those walls, and I have been told by a man who does restorations that it never will.
My mother came up the steps like she already owned the place.
She looked me up and down and said: you look awful, Calliope.
She said it the way you criticise somebody’s clothes. Not unkindly, even. Briskly.
