I burned the roads getting home, early enough to change my uniform and meet the day looking decent, but I arrived too late to save my marriage. Aida had left me. I guess I knew even as I sat in that hotel room she was already gone from me. A man knows these things. I drove up to our small blue house knowing it was empty. A quietness lined the rocky path to the garden. The lilac bush was turning brown. I imagined her leaving as I was driving the climb of Ravalli Hill. Sun was bleeding through the sparse winter grass as I held my breath to see the buffalo herd against all that sky, the same moment I imagined Aida closing the door on the house we shared.

Instead of going after her like I should have, I began to inventory her belongings as I entered the front screened porch, the chore of an officer first on the scene, the piecing together of the clues that would not tell me a story different from the one I already knew. Still I persisted in my task, feeling I owed myself that much, the confirmation of all my failures. Maybe I felt I owed her enough to assess the life she had left behind. It occurred to me that the belongings a person leaves behind aren’t meant to suggest their return. People leave behind physical evidence of the reasons they have chosen to leave. She had left behind plenty, a note scrawled on the back of a grocery bill that simply said it wasn’t going to work, the delicate china cups gathering dust in the display case I had made, four pairs of mended silk stockings, the bonewhite shoes I thought she was proud of, the straight skirt I had hoped would make her look sophisticated, her white church gloves folded in the top drawer with a sprig of sage and dried wild roses, the dangly crystal earrings she mistook for diamonds. And all these things, these possessions, added up to nothing, the sum total of what it seemed I had become. An old guilt spread around me like the ragged quilt she had sewn for our bed. When the clock chimed in the kitchen I had wanted to stop it to mark that moment in my life.