My mother came up the steps like she already owned the place.
She looked me up and down and said: you look awful, Calliope.
She said it the way you criticise somebody’s clothes. Not unkindly, even. Briskly.
That was the first thing my mother said to me in seventeen years.
Not hello. Not your name. Not one syllable about the man in the ground.
You look awful. Four words, about my face, on the morning after I buried the person who raised me.
PART 2
My father did not hug me.
He did not ask how I was. He did not say he was sorry about his own father, who had been dead for six days.
He turned to the movers and said: start upstairs. Furniture first.
That is the sentence I would put in front of anybody who asks me what my father is like.
His own father was six days dead and the first full sentence out of him, on that property, was an instruction about load order.
My sister pushed past me into the hall and wrinkled her nose.
She said: seriously? This place smells like an old man.
She is twenty-six. Her name is Linnea.
She was nine when they left me here. She has no memory of this house being anything other than a place an old man lived, and she has been in it four times in her life.
She does not remember me living with them. She was nine and I was five and the whole thing took one afternoon.
I do not blame her for that. I want to be fair about it because somebody should be.
And I am still going to write down what she said, because she was twenty-six and not nine when she said it, and because the man she was describing had been dead for six days.
Something in me went very still.
Not angry. I know what angry feels like and that was not it. It was more like a room going quiet.
I was five when they brought me to that house.
They told him I would stay for the weekend. There was a bag with four days of clothes in it and a toy rabbit.
