She stares out the window as I pull into a subdivision of small houses, one- and two-bedroom single-family homes worth maybe a hundred and fifty grand at most, most of them with faded, peeling paint and sagging gutters and ten-year-old cars in the driveways. She directs me deeper into the neighborhood, letting the thick, tense silence build between us. Finally, she points to a tiny blue house with gray shutters and a small patch of overgrown yellowing grass. There’s a black mailbox attached to the wall by the front door, the kind with the flap on top, and it’s overflowing with junk mail and catalogues and magazines and envelopes. Several newspapers in translucent pink bags sit on the front stoop in a pile. A green hose lies in a haphazard coil in the driveway at the side of the house, and a chain link fence separates her driveway from the side yard of the house next door. There’s a detached garage, and another tiny patch of dying grass out back.
I pull into the driveway, and Echo is out of the truck before I have it in park. “Thanks for the ride, Ben. See ya.” She closes the door.
I put it in park, shut it off, and get out. Echo watches me lumber awkwardly after her to the front door. She just stares at me, and when I’m on the stoop with her, she finally sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Ben, how clear do I have to be?”
“I hear what you’re saying, Echo, but it doesn’t match the way you were even half an hour ago. I don’t know what you’re thinking, or what you’re feeling, and I don’t expect you to actually do something totally crazy like actually tell me, so I’m gonna stay and help, and you can just go ahead and deal with it.” I meet her gaze steadily, keeping the hurt her words inflicted off my face and out of my eyes. “You can’t do this alone, and you’re not going to.”
Her hazel-green eyes stare into mine, her brows drawn. Eventually she just sighs and unlocks the front door and pushes it open. “Fine. Whatever. Suit yourself. But don’t expect—”
“I never expected anything, Echo.” I move past her, assessing the interior of the house.
There’s a tiled entranceway where the door opens to a coat closet, with a living room to the right. A picture window faces the street, with a couch on the wall kitty-corner, a TV mounted to the wall opposite the couch, and a cheap coffee table between them. Beyond the living room is the kitchen, separated by nothing but an abrupt transition from threadbare tan carpet to cracked and bubbling linoleum.
The house smells musty, with hints of mold and rotting food. There’s a styrofoam container on the coffee table, the lid closed with the handle of a fork sticking out between the lips of the clamshell, two empty Coors cans beside it. A hallway off the kitchen leads, I assume, to the bathroom and bedrooms.
Echo just stands in the entrance, hands fisted at her sides, struggling to breathe. “This house. Jesus, this house.” I wait for her to continue, and eventually she does. “I grew up in this house. She never moved after I left for school. She said she was going to, and I think she even looked at apartments, but she never moved.”
I close the front door and lean against the wall to get my weight off my knee, content to wait for her.
“I don’t want to be here. I don’t know how to do this.” She sniffles. “I’m a bitch, and you don’t deserve it. I’m sorry. Just…go, okay? I’ll be fine.”
I notice she didn’t take back anything she said, though. So I still don’t know which version of Echo is the truth, the Echo that was in my bed, or the Echo standing before me now.
I take her by the shoulders and turn her to face me. “I’m not leaving, so just listen. Here’s what’s going to happen: we start in the kitchen, clean out the cabinets and the fridge and all that. I’ll run out and get a bunch of boxes and some contractor bags. Okay?” She nods, silent, and keeps her eyes on the floor. “Okay. So you start there. Use whatever garbage bags there are here to clean up the trash first, and I’ll be right back.” She nods again, and looks so mixed up and full of agony that I want to kiss her and take it all way, but I don’t.
I wrap my arms around her shoulders and pull her against me for a quick hug, and I kiss the top of her head. “I won’t say it’ll be all right. But I will say that you’ll be okay. Someday. For now, just…keep breathing, okay?”
She lets out a shuddery breath and pushes away from me, sets her purse on the floor near the coat closet and kicks off her shoes, moves into the kitchen. I watch as she digs a box of garbage bags out from under the sink, shakes one open. I leave her there and pick up a flat of moving boxes, a tape gun, and packing paper from a U-Haul store, and then stop by Home Depot for a box of contractor bags. When I get back to the house—only finding it again after several wrong turns—Echo is standing in the kitchen with three full garbage bags around her feet, flipping through a cookbook.
She glances at me, and then goes back to the cookbook, her expression distant, as if seeing memories rather than me.
I haul the bags outside and toss them to the curb. I empty the fridge and freezer item by item, leaving only the half-empty box of Coors. We’ll need those, I think. When the fridge is empty, I start on the cabinets and drawers. Echo glances at me now and then, but seems absorbed in the cookbook, which I realize now has notes in the margins, recipes and adjustments scrawled in the whitespace. The handwriting, I realize, isn’t feminine, but masculine.
I dump the silverware drawer into a bag, and start on the flatware.
Echo glances up as I’m about to toss a couple of plates into the bag. “Not those!” she cries. She stands up, sets the cookbook aside, and takes the plates and bowls from me. “The other stuff is fine. But this set…not these.”
I realize the plates I was about to throw away are fragile and old looking, from an antique set of fine china. I set aside four more plates, six bowls, six tea plates and matching mugs, and six appetizer plates. “Family china or something?”
She nods. “Yeah. It belonged to Grandma. She gave it to Mom when she got married. It’s…very old.”
“And the cookbook?” I ask.
She’s quiet for a long moment, turning a bowl over and over in her hands. “It was…my father’s.” She glances at me. “And no, I’m sorry, there’s no way in hell I’m getting into that right now.”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” I lie.
She softens a bit. I bring in a box and assemble it, tape the edges together. I wrap the china in several layers of packing paper and stack it all in the box, set the box aside, and resume emptying the kitchen. Three contractor bags later, the kitchen is empty. I take a couple bags into the bathroom. It’s getting more personal now. There’s a hair dryer on the sink, still plugged in, a curling iron beside it, two tackle boxes of makeup, and a box of tampons on the floor beside the toilet.