The first thing I saw was the garden along the south fence, Frances June Merritt’s garden for forty years, planted and tended through seasons before I existed, seasons I remembered, and seasons after she was gone.
The flowers had been ripped out.
Not trimmed. Not cut with care. Ripped, with the particular damage of people who pulled them from the ground without thought for roots or soil or the decades that had made them.
Bare stems lay where they had been dropped. The gaps in the garden were the gaps of things taken and not replaced.
They had been used in the wedding arch.
I could see the arch at the far end of the lawn.
The flowers were wilted now, forty-eight hours after being torn from the only soil they had known, woven through the white wood of the arch in a way that had probably been beautiful on Saturday and was now only evidence.
The lawn.
The grass had been torn in strips where tables had been dragged, deep gouges of furniture hauled across wet soil, compressed paths of hundreds of feet dancing through the night. The fire pit, which I had never used because I was always afraid of embers near the garden, had been used and left dirty, the ashes cold and blown by the wind.
The house.
I went inside.
I will not describe all of it. A full inventory would take longer than the story deserves, and the separate pieces of trash matter less than the weight of walking through a place you have tended and finding it treated as disposable.
There were cups on every surface.
The handmade pillows from the couch, the ones Frances had sewn herself, had been used as seat cushions on the lawn and brought back muddy.
The kitchen.
The kitchen was the worst.
The kitchen where the pancakes had been made on Sunday mornings with the ceramic bowl and the wooden spoon, the kitchen with the cast iron in order of size on the hooks Frances had installed, was covered in the remains of food prepared and eaten with none of the care the room deserved.
The spice jars.
Someone had rearranged the spice jars.
I stood looking at that for a long time. It was not the worst damage. It was not the rarest object or the most expensive thing. But Frances’s handwriting was on those jars, and they had been in an order she chose, and someone had moved them and put them back wrong, and that, for reasons I still cannot fully name, was one of the things that stayed.
I called Kelsey.
She answered on the third ring.
I described what I was looking at.
She laughed.
She said: it was my wedding, so I did whatever I wanted. I don’t care what you think. Instead of wasting your time calling me, you should’ve already started cleaning.
I held the phone.
I looked at the kitchen.
