So I propped open the doors, bought a couple of boxes of heavy-duty garbage bags, rented a steam vacuum, and went to work. My parents had let the place go in the last year of their lives. It got away from them, and I hadn’t wanted to see it: the dust on everything, the mouse droppings in the carpet, half the lightbulbs out, and mold spotting the wallpaper in the dark hallway between the living room and the master bedroom. The house smelled like Bengay and abandonment. It came to me that in the last year I had abandoned them. I was glad to get rid of their stuff. Everything I unloaded was one less thing to remind me of their last unhappy months, facing blindness and dementia alone, making up their minds to take one final ride in the Caddy together, to drive away from their troubles without ever leaving the garage. I brought musty comforters and piles of dresses to Goodwill. I put the couch out in the yard with a cardboard FREE sign on it. No one wanted it, but I left it out there. It rotted in the rain.

I stuck a broom under the bed to get at the dust bunnies and swept out a pair of my dad’s jockeys and one of my mother’s shoe boxes. I took a peek in the box, expecting to find a pair of heels, and was stunned to discover that it contained nearly two thousand dollars in unpaid parking and speeding tickets—there was an unpaid parking violation from the City of Boston that dated to 1993. There was also an unpaid dentist bill from 2004, a VHS copy of When Harry Met Sally . . . from Blockbuster Video, and a paperback titled Another Marvelous Thing. I didn’t understand how the book connected to the other items until I flipped open the back cover. It was a library book, and I knew at first glance that my mother had borrowed it in the last century and never got around to returning it. There was a lending card in the back, tucked into a stiff beige pocket, stamped with a return date. A relic from that ancient, fabled era before Facebook. At a dime a day, we probably owed the library our whole house. Or at least the cost of a replacement book.

The dentist my mother had stiffed retired in 2011 and now lived in Arizona. The local Blockbuster had long since been replaced by a cell-phone dealership. I figured my mom was off the hook for the parking tickets; you couldn’t try a dead woman. That left the book. I stuck Another Marvelous Thing into the pocket of my baggy army jacket and got moving.