Her parents’ basement smelled like old newspapers and air freshener—sweet decay with a top note of pine. In increments, Clare was helping them clean it. Once a week she would come over, have dinner, then head downstairs into the time warp. The process transported her directly back to her childhood: this imploding mountain of boxes was her grandparents’ apartment, piled in the middle of the room. Here was their whole life in things, the sentimental and the practical, treasures rubbing elbows with trash: her grandmother’s cylindrical aluminum cookie press, a Tiffany lamp, Clare’s favorite plates (the white ones with the beautiful pink-cabbage-rose border). Old, water-stained cookbooks with Annelise’s notations in the margins in German, glass jars of ancient spices and brass candlesticks from Germany and one entire box filled with Annelise’s purses.
Clare and Ruth had packed up the apartment right after Annelise died, but they had paid no attention to detail. It was too soon for it. So they just threw everything into boxes. After they’d sold the furniture (and paid some teenagers to haul that splintered dining room table out to the curb), they really had only four carloads of things to transport to Ruth and Mel’s, up and down the stairs to the basement ten, twenty, thirty times, and done.
The boxes stayed that way in the basement for a long time, unopened and ignored.
“Not yet,” Ruth said, again and again. “Maybe in a month or two.” Annelise was eighty-five when she died. Ruth was sixty-one. No matter. She grieved for her mother audaciously, like a child.
Finally one Sunday afternoon Clare went downstairs by herself. She tugged her hair into a ponytail, threw an old white T-shirt of her father’s over her clothes. She was glad for the distraction.
She found an open packet of cherry cough drops in a white patent-leather purse, the top lozenge exposed and covered in lint, and she tucked the roll into her own pocket. She found a photo album, pictures of her mother as a toddler, round-cheeked and tiny, her mouth a tricky smile, as if she had just concocted a foolproof plan to rob a bank. She found a blue and white coffee grinder, the one she hardly noticed on her grandparents’ kitchen wall all those years. She pried open the metal lid. Rough grounds and oily coffee bean casings dotted the bottom of the container. She breathed in the still-strong smell, the residue of her grandparents’ lives—all that they had touched, consumed, discarded.
Clare was wrestling with a wobbly old floor lamp, winding its cord around the base and waltzing it over to the “discard” pile when she started at nothing—a ghost, a sixth sense—and glanced up.
Ruth was standing in the doorway. How long had she been there, silently surveying the room? She had one hand planted firmly on her hip and was clutching a tube of Colgate in the other. She smiled and waved the toothpaste at Clare like she was conducting an orchestra. “Sweetie,” she said. “You can have this.”
Clare swiped at her forehead with the back of her hand. “No, thanks, Mom. I don’t want it.”
“I got it with double coupons. But it’s not the kind Dad and I like,” she said. She stared at the pile of dresses on the floor, winter wools and summer linens, and Clare’s eyes followed her mother’s.
Annelise had been a very short woman, just shy of five feet tall. Clare shot past her by the time she was in fourth grade. She had favored pastels and thin belts, though she was short-waisted. She wore low heels and a full face of makeup to walk a half-block to the mailbox. And those purses. Clare had stacked them in a heap next to the dresses. It looked as if Annelise had just left the room after rampaging through her closet and finding everything unsuitable.
“I thought we could donate all of this to the high school’s drama department, if that’s okay,” Clare said gently. “Don’t you think that would be nice? For the clothes to have a second life like that?”
Ruth nodded. “I suppose so. Sure.”
There was a framed painting of irises leaning against the wall. An empty yellow plastic garbage can and a table lamp. A green ashtray: two dogs, sitting back to back, with the space in the middle for cigarette butts. Where did that come from, and who had use for an ashtray these days?
“Dad and I won’t even use this toothpaste,” her mother said, coming back to herself. “You should just take it.”
Clare allowed herself to roll her eyes at her mother, a pleasure reserved for special occasions now that she was actually an adult. “I don’t need any toothpaste,” she said, tapping on the lampshade to bring the point home.
She knew what Ruth was thinking: that Clare didn’t know what she needed. That she had a job but no career, no husband, not even a nice boyfriend, just a lot of books in a tiny, dingy apartment in a not sufficiently safe neighborhood.
Her mother sighed. “Fine, don’t take the toothpaste.”
That sigh! It was Kryptonite to Clare. It was the heat that baked guilt right into her bones.
“All right,” Clare said, steadying the broken lamp and walking over to her mother. “Okay. I will take the toothpaste.”
Ruth shook her head. “No, don’t if you don’t want it.”
“I want the toothpaste.” Clare chewed the inside of her cheek. “I do.”
“Hmm.”
“Mom. Please. I would really like that toothpaste.”
Her mother’s face eased into a smile. “Good! I was hoping you would!”