In the week after, we managed to get the charming lake house in Virginia on the market. We priced low and received an offer, seemingly within moments. We’d spent so many Augusts there, along an old trade route that someone forgot to pave, the pulse of the water lapping at the dock as Wallis floated in her favorite pink inner tube, the smell of pine trees and earth. The night after the contract was accepted, I dreamed about the bunk room under the cottage’s sloping tin roof, where I read whatever I wanted, listened to owls and crickets and frogs. It was there I felt like I didn’t have to try so hard.

The proceeds from the sale would help pay the retainer for our litigator for Gregory’s estate and a meager percentage of billable hours. But I knew it wouldn’t be enough.

The house on P, after more than half a century as the Richardsons’, would have to pass from our hands to strangers.

February

February

Six

The apartment on the floor above mine had recently been vacated by some graduate students, so soon after we resolved to let go of P, I made arrangements and my mother and Wallis signed a lease. Although first Cricket had to take issue with the building’s charmless architecture, the thin, greige carpet on the stairs, the narrow and gloomy hallways...

It wasn’t as terrible as all that. Since it was on the top floor, the ceilings were higher than in my unit below, and the rooms flowed in an open and comfortable way. The main room, which Cricket immediately took to calling the living room, was bright and square and cozily sat six. The two bedrooms both had windows with generous views south over the ginkgo trees and slate turrets of stately Victorians, toward the leaf-shaded center of Logan Circle.

Before the estate-sale people came through P, we had to do the deciding: here, the pile to donate. There, the pile to sell. No, Cricket, the new apartment won’t fit your mother’s old sewing machine desk.

Wallis, still pallid in yoga pants and an old rugby shirt, was no help. I tried to get her through her bedroom the first afternoon, but she’d find an item in the corner of her closet and call me up from Gregory’s study to reminisce. Dolls, lunch boxes, school T-shirts, a big green mason jar filled with pennies and dimes. All had to be touched, all had to be discussed. Remember...? she’d begin.

My childhood bedroom I saved for last. Most of my former possessions—into a single pile. Trash. Best to throw it out. Best not to dwell.

When I was done, I joined Cricket in the kitchen, sunny yellow with butcher block counters. I sat on a counter stool and watched her sort silverware.