Chapter 1/Episode 4: Throw It Out, Don’t Look

Why Does Her Mother Want These Boxes Thrown Out Unopened?

Rose let herself in at nine with a box of doughnuts and a thermos of her own coffee, because she had never in her life trusted anyone else’s, and she found Lila on the floor of the back bedroom surrounded by the contents of a cedar chest.

“What are you doing,” Rose said.

“Sorting. Look at this.” Lila held up a christening cap of yellowed lace, fine as a cobweb. “This is gorgeous, Mom. This is handmade. Somebody put a month into this.”

Rose looked at it the way a person looks at a snake on a path. “That’s just old baby things. Put it in the bag.”

“Whose baby things? Mine? Yours?”

“Ours. Everyone’s. People kept things in those days.” Rose set down the doughnuts on the dresser with a small definite click. “Lila, I want to talk to you about how we’re doing this. The back rooms, this room, the sewing room, the closets back here. I want it all bagged and taken to the transfer station. We don’t sort it. We don’t go through it. We bag it and it goes.”

Lila sat back on her heels. The cap lay across her open hand. “Mom, this is Babcia’s whole life. There could be photographs back here, papers, your baptism record. I do this for a living. You don’t throw out an archive, you go through it.”

“It isn’t an archive.” Rose’s voice did not rise. It never rose. It simply went harder, the way water goes to ice. “It’s an old woman’s clutter, and she is not dead, and I will not have her things picked over and turned into a, a project. She’d hate it. You know she’d hate it.”

“She told me to ask Joseph Mazur about that parcel up the road.”

The change in her mother was small and total. Rose stopped with a doughnut halfway to a napkin and set it down again, uneaten, and when she spoke her voice had a flatness underneath the flatness, a second floor under the first.

“You went up to Mazur’s.”

“He says the same thing you do. Don’t touch the parcel, leave it alone, some things stay buried.” Lila stood, the cap still in her hand. “Mom, what is going on with that piece of ground? Babcia’s terrified of it. Mazur cracked in half talking about it. And now you want the back of this house bagged and gone before I can look at any of it. From where I’m standing that’s three people I love acting like there’s a body buried up there.”

It was meant as a figure of speech. She heard how it sounded a half second after she said it, and she saw it hit her mother, and the strangest thing happened. Rose did not laugh it off. Rose did not say something cutting. Rose went, for one unguarded instant, white around the mouth, and her eyes went to the north window and the gravel road beyond it, and then she got hold of herself with a visible effort, the way you’d haul a door shut against a wind.

“That’s an ugly thing to say,” Rose said quietly. “Your grandmother came here with nothing. She lost everything before she ever set foot in this country, everyone she had. If there’s some piece of ground she wants left alone, after the life she’s had, the least we can do, the very least, is let her have it without you treating it like a, a mystery to solve.” She picked up her coffee. Her hand was not quite steady. “Bag the back rooms, Lila. Please. Do this one thing for me.”

She left without the doughnuts, which she never did, and Lila stood in the back bedroom and listened to her mother’s car pull away too fast on the gravel.

She looked down at the lace cap in her hand. Then she looked at the cedar chest, and the bags her mother wanted filled, and the closed door of the sewing room across the hall that she had not opened yet.

She made her decision the way she made most of the decisions that mattered, quietly and alone and against instructions. She set the lace cap aside in her KEEP box. And she carried her work light across the hall and opened the sewing room door.