I rolled the window down. Moose put his head out and started doing the thing where he closes his eyes against the wind.
It smelled like September. Cut grass, river, and asphalt that had been warm all day.
I took the back way to my parents' street. The house was at the end of Maple Avenue, three blocks off the square, on a street that ran toward the river. I knew every house by memory. The yellow one belonged to the Maguires. The blue one with the porch swing had been the Anderssons, twos's. The bungalow across from my parents' place, with morning glories climbing the porch railing, had belonged to Mrs. Ford.
She had given me lemonade in mason jars the summer I was ten and kept coming back from the river, too muddy for my mother's kitchen. She'd passed away a year and a half ago. I'd thought about coming up for the funeral.
I'd done a lot of thinking about doing things in the last year and a half.
I pulled into the driveway. Sat there a second. Moose looked at me.
"I know, buddy. I know."
The lockbox was where my dad had said it would be. The key turned. The door swung.
The house exhaled.
Rosemary. Lemon. The cedar of the closets. Four years vacant, and the house still smelled like my mother.
I stood there with my hand on the doorknob and let myself stand there.
Moose pushed past my knees and disappeared down the hall.
I walked through the rooms one at a time. Same wallpaper in the dining room. Same green tile in the powder room my mother had always meant to replace. Same warped board on the third step up to the second floor.
In the kitchen, I set the two coffee mugs I'd packed in my carry-on on the windowsill above the sink. The only two I'd actually picked out myself.
Two things on the windowsill that were mine.
It was a start.
I unloaded the trailer alone. I'd been unloading things alone for most of a year, and I'd gotten efficient at it. Box from the trailer, across the threshold, into whichever room the label on the side said it belonged in. Living room. Kitchen. The spare bedroom upstairs had been mine until I was eighteen.
The lifting wasn't the hard part. I'd spent the last five years getting eighty-pound dogs onto exam tables, and a box of someone else's wedding china weighed less than a sedated Lab. The hard part was the pause every time I set a box down and didn't know which room it went in.
A box of books neither of us had opened. A box of lamps the decorator had chosen. A box of throw pillows Brett's mother had insisted I needed.
She'd done a lot of insisting.
The veterinary journals I knew. They went on the kitchen table. My books—the actual ones, the worn-spined Agatha Christies and the Diane Ackerman from grad school—I left in their box for now. The herbs I'd packed at the last minute had survived the move better than I had. I lined them up on the windowsill next to the mugs.
Five things on the windowsill that were mine. I was carrying the last box up the porch steps when my phone rang. I set it down on the top step before I looked at the screen.
Mom.
I tapped to answer and tucked the phone between my ear and my shoulder.
"You made it."
"I made it." The screen door behind me had swung half-closed in the breeze. I caught it with my heel before it could clap shut.
"How long did it take?"
"Six hours. Moose breathed in my ear the whole way."
"He hates the car."
"He does." I put the box down and lowered myself onto the porch step. The wood had the kind of give old porches develop, soft from a hundred summers of rain.
