Two days after my parents’ funeral, I came home from a twelve hour hospital shift and found my life stacked in damp cardboard in the garage. The boxes were crooked and half open, already taking on rain through the gap where the garage door didn’t seal properly. One had split at the bottom. Another had tipped onto its side, spilling old notebooks and shoes onto the concrete. My nursing diploma had a soft bend through the middle where the frame glass must have pressed against it. Three textbooks were swollen at the edges. The blue flowered tin my mother kept in a kitchen drawer had popped open, and her recipe cards were curled with moisture, the ink beginning to feather at the corners. Chicken and dumplings. Lemon loaf. Sunday pot roast. Notes in the margins in her careful handwriting. Add more thyme. Briana likes extra pepper.
I stood there in my scrubs, too tired to be angry yet, and looked through the kitchen window into the house I had grown up in. I could see the lamp by the sink turned on. I could see the fruit bowl I had filled three days earlier still on the counter. I could see my sister in law, Nicole, crossing the living room with a wine glass in her hand as if it were any other evening in any other house. She saw me through the glass, paused, lifted the glass in my direction like a private little toast, and kept walking.
