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.
That was the first thing my mother said to me in seventeen years.
Not hello. Not your name. Not one syllable about the man in the ground.
You look awful. Four words, about my face, on the morning after I buried the person who raised me.
PART 2
My father did not hug me.
He did not ask how I was. He did not say he was sorry about his own father, who had been dead for six days.
He turned to the movers and said: start upstairs. Furniture first.
That is the sentence I would put in front of anybody who asks me what my father is like.
His own father was six days dead and the first full sentence out of him, on that property, was an instruction about load order.
My sister pushed past me into the hall and wrinkled her nose.
She said: seriously? This place smells like an old man.
She is twenty-six. Her name is Linnea.
She was nine when they left me here. She has no memory of this house being anything other than a place an old man lived, and she has been in it four times in her life.
She does not remember me living with them. She was nine and I was five and the whole thing took one afternoon.
I do not blame her for that. I want to be fair about it because somebody should be.
And I am still going to write down what she said, because she was twenty-six and not nine when she said it, and because the man she was describing had been dead for six days.
Something in me went very still.
Not angry. I know what angry feels like and that was not it. It was more like a room going quiet.
I was five when they brought me to that house.
They told him I would stay for the weekend. There was a bag with four days of clothes in it and a toy rabbit.
That weekend lasted seventeen years.
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