In the house I grew up in, I am in the living room with the high ceiling and the low carpet. My wife is in the kitchen turning either side of the kitchen-sink faucet to make sure one of them comes out hot. The house is ours, if we want it.
Uproot and all? she said on the way here, sitting in the back seat, and not the passenger.
If you want to, I said. You don’t have to.
She has her hand in the refrigerator, moving her fingers to see how cold it is.
This’ll need to be replaced, she says.
And then she is upstairs and I sit on the hard, cracked, leather couch with the thin legs and which is cold when I sit down on it. It is cold because of its being by the windows which are old, and it is January, after all. There is a cold everywhere within feet of the windows, and then, even, elsewhere in the house.
My wife speaks to me through the grate in the ceiling high above me that lets the forced hot air up into the master bedroom she’s kneeling in.
She’d want you to move in? she says.
You don’t have to do anything, I say.
You don’t feel an obligation?
To whom?
I rise the stairs to find her but she is not in the bedroom above the living room now. The stairs are narrow coming up and the ceiling, here, is low. My childhood bedroom is really only a side-closet, filled inside with a disused sideboard placed too closely to the window, this one not just cold but letting in water from the snow built up below it along the dormer, and so molding along its edges.
A phone call from my sister, but I do not take it.
Why not? my wife says, standing now in the doorframe.
Well—you make a decision first, I say.
Just like this, now?
A phone call from my sister, and I take it. She chastises me: You’re taking her things before you even bury her! My wife takes the phone from me, she can hear my sister in the vacancy of the space.
The ground is frozen, she says to my sister.
She walks away with my phone, and downstairs. She is on the leather couch, I can hear through the grate when I walk into the master bedroom which has not yet been cleaned out because we haven’t had the heart.
And in the room with the low ceiling and the wood floors I sit on the bed, warmer and farther from the windows. There are the pictures beside it, of me and not of my sister. One picture taken at a distance of me with my wife, though not when she was my wife and when things couldn’t be ours.
Recommended Reading: You’ll Like It Here, Ashton Politanoff; Kick the Latch, Kathryn Scanlan; This Should Be Written in the Present Tense, Helle Helle; Welcome Home, Lucia Berlin; 10:04, Ben Lerner; A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley
