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Relationships invariably soured, grew full of expectations and whininess and women saying one thing while meaning something different.
I look at Cecilia. She has her legs crossed, fingers playing with the hem of her skirt, as she sings along to the radio. Somehow I doubt she would be like that. She’s always been honest and straight with me. The trouble, because there’s always trouble, might be less this time. Might be something we could work through together.
Might even be worth it.
An hour later, she sits in my grandfather’s study with me, cross-legged on the floor. A giant binder of photographs is open on her lap.
I’ve glanced at her several times already. It feels raw, exposing, to have her see the albums I never knew he kept. Half of me wants nothing more than to snatch them away.
But that would be admitting they mean something.
I return to the neatly kept ledgers of expenses on his desk instead. He has dozens of these, records dating back decades. There are things here he expected me to pick up after he died. Things I’ve neglected to.
Including the yearly expenses he paid for cemetery upkeep. I look at the receipt until the letters blur. Of course he paid for that. And with him dead, the responsibility falls to me. How had I not realized that before?
Are my parents’ graves overgrown now? Devoid of flowers?
“Oh,” Cecilia says. “You were adorable.”
I tear my gaze away, focusing on her. She’s wearing a soft smile. “I can’t believe you actually found baby pictures.”
“This goes in the keep pile.” She closes the leather-bound album with a snap and stacks it on top of the others in the corner.
I close the ledger I’m reading. Gravesite maintenance. Things I’ve never thought about, not since I moved away from this house. I can’t even remember the last time I was there, and for the first time in years, guilt punches me in the gut.
“Hey,” she says. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“It must be hard, being here. Surrounded by all his stuff.”
I brace my hand against the desk. His desk. Suddenly, my hands look foreign to me. A grown man’s hands on a desk I remember so vividly from childhood. I’d been sent here to do my homework on occasion. He’d sit in the armchair and watch with a book in his hand.
I’d considered it punishment, then. Now I wonder if it wasn’t his attempt at getting us to spend time together.
“He sat here so often, even after he retired. Work was such a big part of who he was.”
Her eyes soften. “Part of his self-image.”
“Yes,” I say. I stroke the leather inlay with a single finger. “He loved trivia and quizzes. It was the only game we played, him and I. There should be an old Trivial Pursuit box around here somewhere.”
“Trivia, huh?”
“Yeah. The questions got outdated eventually, and we’d end up in arguments about whether or not to accept the answer on the card or the actual truth. You know, Moscow is the capital of the Soviet Union. That sort of thing.”
“Did it get heated?”
“Yes. Stupidly so. We were both pretty stubborn.”
She smiles. “You, stubborn?”
“Hard to believe, is it?”
“Incomprehensible.”
I look at the neat rows of books surrounding us, gaze wandering. “On the anniversary of my parents’ and brother’s death, he’d order pizza. We never had takeout pizza otherwise. I think he assumed greasy pizza was the best way to take a nine-year-old boy’s mind off of their deaths.”
“What kind of pizza did you get?”
