I looked at the spice jars in the wrong order.
I said: I see.
I said it quietly.
She said: yes. You do.
I said: I’ll be in touch.
I hung up.
I cleaned the house.
I want to say that without martyrdom. The cleaning was not performed suffering. It was necessary. I did it because it needed doing, and because the other choice was leaving the house in a state Frances would not have recognized.
I cleaned for two days.
The interior first. Every surface, every corner, the kitchen most carefully because the kitchen required the most care. I found a bottle cap under the refrigerator. I found a piece of ribbon in the bathroom that had been used for something decorative and lost. I put the spice jars back in their old order, using a photograph on my phone that I had taken the month before for reasons I had not understood then and understood completely now.
The exterior was harder.
The lawn I could only partly repair, seeding the torn places and clearing the debris. The furniture ruts would take a season, and some were deeper than I could fill without professional help.
The garden.
The garden was the thing I kept returning to.
The flowers were gone.
Not damaged. Gone. Ripped out at the roots, used in an arch for a wedding, wilted, and thrown away.
Forty years of Frances’s choices.
I could replant.
I was already thinking about what I would plant, what matched what had been there, what I could find and when.
But the planting would be mine, not hers. The new garden would be shaped by what she had done and still would not be what she had done, and that was a loss of a particular kind, the kind with no price and no clean name.
It was irreplaceable in the way handmade and tended things are irreplaceable.
Thomas came to the lake house on Tuesday.
He walked through what I had already cleaned.
He was silent for a long time.
He said: I’m sorry.
I said: I know.
He said: I didn’t know she would do this.
I said: you made a promise you couldn’t keep.
He said: I said I would make sure she respected the house.
I said: yes. And you didn’t.
He said: I wasn’t here. I was at the hospital with you.
I said: yes.
I said: Thomas. The conditions I gave were not complicated. Don’t touch the garden. Clean before you leave. The agreement was with Kelsey, not with you, and you were not the one who needed to enforce it.
He said: I know.
He said: she should have.
I said: yes.
He said: what do you want me to do?
I said: I want you to let me handle it.
He looked at me.
