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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Checklist
The house smelled like the inside of a seashell: mineral, old air, a hint of something that had once been sweet. I set the box cutter between my teeth and nudged the swollen door with a shoulder. It opened on the second try, groaning the way it always had, even before the hinges rusted, even before my mother began taping notes to everything that groaned.
On the kitchen table, under a plastic fruit bowl, I found her last note. It was written for nobody and everyone, the way she preferred to speak when the audience was household objects. “Remember to jiggle the chain on the bathroom flusher,” it said in the neat, careful handwriting that had graded a hundred second-grade spelling lists. “Remember the lake rises slowly and then all at once.”
“Flood watch until midnight,” I told the empty room, as if it needed the weather. My phone pinged with realtor messages I didn’t want to read. My sister Nora texted, I’m an hour out. Traffic on the bridge. Start without me.
Start without me. That was the phrase we used a lot here, in this house that had lived longer than our father and just barely longer than our mother. It was an invitation to be impatient and a forgiveness for doing so. I clicked open the box cutter and set to work.
Her things weren’t valuable, not in the way that made auctions glitter. Mason jars, their lids threaded with rust, lined the pantry. A pair of galoshes leaned into each other behind the door like tired dancers. The doorframe between kitchen and hall had hash marks etched into the wood, our childhood heights scrawled in pencil: Evan, 7. Evan, 10 (wouldn’t stand still!). Nora, 6 1/2 (she insisted). Someone had started to sand those marks shallow the month after I left for college. The sander had stopped and never been plugged in again.
My phone rang. It was Arthur Pike from next door, whose age had grown around him like moss on a stump. “You made it,” he said without hello. I could hear the radio in his house, the forecast steady and stern. “You want my extra sandbags?”
“I’ll take them.” I looked out the kitchen window. The lake, a long gray tongue, licked closer than it should have. “I’ll pay you back.”
“You don’t pay back sandbags,” he said. “You return them muddy or not at all.”
My mother would have liked that. She’d have put it on the board, chalked it up in that cursive that softened every letter into something the hand wanted to hold.
