The dresser was a forest of framed photographs, and these he left. The room had already been emptied of Colette’s mother’s things. Some images had to remain. He scanned the plaster walls and took down a picture of Mr. Jeansomme’s brother holding a fish. He left a crucifix next to a window. Leaning into the hall, he dropped the suitcases on the floor, ready for the Goodwill people. Other things—a shoe-shine kit, a pump shotgun—he put upstairs in the attic. Next he took on the bathroom and its jungle of pill bottles, razors from the past twenty years, colognes, soaps, a bottle of hair oil plugged with a twist of paper. He tried not to think of what he was doing, and he disposed of things as if they had belonged to a stranger. After the bathroom, he was further from the body, and he took up to the attic fishing gear, books, carpenter’s tools, a collection of brass buttons from the Civil War, Victrola records by Gene Austin and Vernon Dalhart, and all the lifetime of things stuck in closets or leaning against walls. He couldn’t move everything. Just in terms of objects, the old man would be with Colette for years. But he thought that if they could diminish his presence for a while, Colette could begin to let the house be her own.

Up the dark oak stairs came the clink of bottles as Colette threw things from the refrigerator and freezer into garbage cans. He went down and helped her go deep into cabinets, where they found older quarts of faded blackberry preserves made from fruit they had picked together the spring they were fifteen years old. They cleaned as if cleaning were an athletic event, without mercy, without thinking about what anything meant. They pulled appliances from the walls and attacked the dust, sweeping Mr. Jeansomme’s buttons and matchsticks out of the dark. They threw dented pots and broken coffeemakers and popcorn poppers down the back steps. Colette did not speak, touched nothing in a slow, fond manner, just grabbed and threw like a hireling, the way Paul had told her to act.