Aunt Margaret pulls me to her. I smell the Ivory soap she bathes with, the talcum powder she brushes on her skin each morning and night. She holds me hard, like she wants to remember exactly how I feel, make an imprint of my body on hers. She knows that though she’s in as good health as an eighty-two-year-old woman can expect, at her age each goodbye may be the last. She loosens her hold, though her hands linger on my arms a few moments longer.

“Take good care of yourself, Maggie,” she says, reaching into her skirt pocket and pulling out a wad of tissue. “I best go now before I make a scene.”

She heads back down the drive, dabbing her eyes with the tissue as she walks.

I go back inside, to fill one more cardboard box with my father’s clothes, to say my goodbyes, to close more than just this house before I leave. But it isn’t that easy. I would like to say my father and I reconciled in these last months, that as I tended him the past was simply forgotten. But there were times the old grievances resurfaced and the less angelic part of our natures won out. When that happened it was easy enough to believe nothing had really changed between us.

Yet it had. We’d made our tentative, sideways gestures of reconciliation, and they were not always self-serving and they were not always futile. Maybe that was as much as we were capable of, especially in a place where even land turns inward, shuts itself off from the rest of the world.

All that’s left is the closet. I open its door and smell mothballs and the dank, musty odor of clothes shut years in darkness. The faint linger of cigarette smoke as well. I free cotton and flannel shirts from the rattling jumble of clothes hangers, then dig deeper into the closet for two pair of khaki pants, a heavy winter coat, and a denim work jacket. I stuff them in the cardboard box, then take out the denim jacket and put it on. I stand before the bureau mirror. The sleeves come to my knuckles, the denim loose on my shoulders. Not a good fit, but that seems appropriate. I turn back the sleeves, then lift the last box and carry it outside.

The morning has a cool, clean feel as I drive out Damascus Church Road, and an October sky widens overhead with not a wisp of gray or white cloud, just blue smoothed out like a quilt tacked on a frame. It’s a sky that makes everything beneath it brighter, more clarified. I cross the creek and pass bottomland Joel planted in the spring with corn. What stalks remain standing look like something after fire, brittle and singed to an ashy gray, the shriveled shucks clinched close.