We carried the bags inside. Two trips. When we were done, the cranberry sauce and the pecans and the clementines and the mustard were sitting on a long steel table in the back with about forty other bags of groceries other people had dropped off that week. The pie crusts and a package of butter and a carton of heavy cream were still in a bag by my feet.
I didn’t leave.
I don’t know why. I suppose I didn’t want to go home to an empty house and a calendar that said Noon. Adam’s.
“Do you need help sorting?” I asked Clare.
She looked at me. “You want to?”
“I think I do.”
So I stayed. I put on a pair of plastic gloves and stood at the long steel table with two college kids from Miami University and a retired dentist named Harold, and I sorted canned goods for an hour and a half. Vegetables in one bin. Soups in another. Fruit. Beans. Pasta. Peanut butter. Harold told jokes. The college kids played Christmas music on a little speaker. Somebody had hung paper chains from the ceiling.
Near the end, I carried an armload of boxes back to the supply closet, and I stopped.
There was a tall metal cabinet against the back wall. Gray. Dented. With a door that closed perfectly now, because Walter had spent two Thursdays in a row fixing the hinge in the spring of 2021. He’d come home with grease on his hands and said, “That door’s going to outlive me, Jo.”
It had.
Someone had taped a white paper snowflake to the front of it. A child’s snowflake, lopsided, with too many cuts in the middle so it was mostly holes. And under the snowflake, on a strip of masking tape, in black marker, somebody had written: WALT’S CABINET.
I stood there looking at it.
Clare found me there a few minutes later.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. She just stood beside me, looking at it too.
“One of the kids from the after-school program made the snowflake,” she said finally. “Gus put the tape on. He said it shouldn’t be just any cabinet.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Come have some coffee, Joanne.”
Her office is a tiny room off the back hallway, crammed with filing cabinets and boxes and a desk covered in paper. There’s a window that looks out at the parking lot and a coffee maker on top of a mini-fridge that makes coffee strong enough to strip paint.
On the wall behind her desk, there’s a photograph of Walter.
I’d never seen it before. Somebody must have taken it at one of the summer picnics. He was carrying one end of a folding table across a patch of grass, in his old Cincinnati Reds cap and a T-shirt with sweat stains, and he was laughing at something outside the picture. Head back. Mouth open. That big laugh of his that you could hear from three houses away.
Clare poured me a cup of coffee and sat down across from me.
“He used to bring me those stale doughnuts from the bakery on Main,” she said, nodding at the photo. “Every Tuesday. The ones they couldn’t sell. He’d say, ‘Clare, these are vintage.’”
I laughed. It came out wet.
We sat there with our coffee.
I’d spent two years deciding what to keep of his.
His clothes went first. Most of them to Westdale’s clothing closet, which felt right. I kept two flannel shirts and his Reds cap. His tools went to Adam, who has never once used them and keeps them in a box in his garage. His fishing gear went to my brother-in-law in Kentucky.
The hockey collection took the longest.
Walter grew up in Cleveland, back when the Barons were the minor league team in town. His father took him to games at the old Arena when he was five. He fell in love. He played in high school, badly, he always said, and coached Adam’s peewee team when Adam was little. But mostly, he collected.
For nearly thirty years, he brought home old programs, ticket stubs, team photographs, signed pucks, broken sticks, pennants, and pieces of equipment from estate sales and flea markets and antique malls across three states. He’d come home on a Saturday afternoon holding something wrapped in newspaper, grinning like a kid. “Jo. You’re not going to believe what I found.” A program from the 1952 Barons championship. A goalie mask from 1967. A ticket stub from the night the Cleveland Crusaders played their first game.
Eventually there were shelves of them. In the basement. Labeled binders. Plastic sleeves. A spreadsheet on the old desktop computer that he updated every Sunday night.
I didn’t know what to do with any of it. I’m not a hockey person. I never understood the appeal. I’d go down to the basement after the funeral and stand among all those binders and feel like I was standing in a room full of a language I couldn’t read.
So last spring, I called an auction house in Columbus that specializes in sports memorabilia. Two men in khakis came down and spent three days in my basement. They were very respectful. One of them got tears in his eyes when he opened the binder with the 1952 program. He said Walter had a very good eye.
They spent months cataloging everything. They sold it in separate lots over the summer and fall. Online. To collectors all over the country. A dentist in Toronto bought the goalie mask. A man in Minnesota bought the championship program.
The final payment arrived six weeks before Christmas. Thirty-one thousand dollars, after commissions and expenses.
I’d put it in a savings account and hadn’t touched it.
During the summer, sitting in this same office, I’d told Clare I wanted some of the proceeds to go to Westdale. In Walter’s memory. I hadn’t settled on an amount. Five thousand, maybe. Ten. I didn’t know.
Adam knew about the sale.
He and Renee had been looking for a house for almost a year. They were renting a three-bedroom split-level in Fairfield. The landlord kept raising the rent. They wanted something of their own. Something with a bigger yard for the kids. Every few weeks, Adam would send me a listing from his phone. Look at this one, Mom. Isn’t this great? Four bedrooms. Finished basement.
In October, sitting at my kitchen table, I’d mentioned that the last auction check had come in.
“How much?” Adam asked.
I told him.
He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Wow. That would make a pretty decent down payment.”
“It would,” I said.
That was all. He didn’t ask. I didn’t offer. We talked about something else. The kids’ school. His job at the bank. And we hadn’t discussed it again.
But I’d thought about it. Every day since. I’d lain in bed at night and thought about it.
Across Clare’s desk, with Walter laughing over her shoulder, I asked her about the housing fund.
Clare put down her mug.
