the spoon still resting where he left it
The kitchen is warm. Not from anything she has done.
Afternoon sun through a west-facing window, the glass not particularly clean, so the light arrives softened, almost deliberate. As if it has been told to be gentle here.
She stands in the doorway with a box she bought at the hardware store on the way. The box is too large. She knew this when she bought it. She bought it anyway because the smaller ones looked like they might be enough, and she did not want to carry something that looked like it might be enough.
The mug is on the counter. Chipped at the rim — the side you'd drink from if you were left-handed, which he was. A spoon rests inside it at an angle. Not placed. Left. The difference between those two words is the entire problem.
She does not touch the mug.
Things she knows:
The landlord will change the locks at 9 a.m. tomorrow.
The apartment is a one-bedroom, which the listing called a "junior one-bedroom," which means the bedroom is the size of a decision you cannot take back.
She has been given this evening. That is the word the landlord used. Given. As though time in this apartment were a thing that could be offered, portioned, held in someone else's hand and passed across.
She has until morning.
She has one room to clear.
She chose the kitchen.
The jacket hangs over the back of the chair nearest the window. Brown canvas, unlined. The left pocket sags — she can see the weight from here. She does not check what's in it. She already knows it will be a lighter and two receipts and possibly a pen that doesn't work, because he kept pens that didn't work the way other people keep promises: out of some loyalty to the idea that they once had.
The jacket is not in the kitchen because he was careless. The jacket is in the kitchen because the kitchen was where he lived. The bedroom was where he slept. The kitchen was where he sat and read and didn't call her back and ate cereal at hours that were not cereal hours and looked out the window at the street below, which was not beautiful but was, she supposes, his.
She opens the drawer.
The drawer resists — swollen wood, humidity, a summer of no one opening it. She pulls harder and it gives all at once, the contents shifting forward with a sound like shuffling cards.
Bills. A phone bill from March, unopened. Electric, January through April, the envelopes getting progressively less white, as though even paper gives up. A letter from the city about recycling. A menu from a Thai place with a phone number written on the back in handwriting that is not his.
Train tickets.
She picks one up.
The ink has faded but not gone. Dated October, two years ago. The destination is a city she has been to once, for a wedding neither of them enjoyed. She remembers him at the reception, standing near the bar with his jacket over his arm, talking to someone's cousin about — what? She can't remember. She remembers the jacket. She remembers that he left before the cake.
Another ticket. July. A different line, heading north.
Another. Undated, or the date has given up entirely.
She lays them on the counter beside the mug. They look like a sentence she can almost read.
The bills she puts in the box.
The tickets she does not.
There is a system she planned. She planned it on the train coming here, which took forty minutes, during which she also planned what to say if anyone asked what she was doing, and what to wear, and how long to stay, and whether to eat something first or eat after, and she planned all of these things because planning is the thing you do when the thing you need to do is not a thing that planning can help with.
The system: bills in the box. Anything with his handwriting, keep. Food, discard. Dishes — she doesn't know about dishes. Whose dishes are they now. Not the landlord's. Not hers. Dishes that belong to a lease that has ended, to a tenancy that is no longer a tenancy but a fact about the past.
She opens the cabinet above the sink.
Two plates. Three bowls — no, two bowls and a plate that is pretending to be a bowl, warped from the microwave or from age or from the particular entropy of objects left alone too long. A glass. Another glass, this one with a logo from a race he ran once, a 5K, and she remembers being surprised because he was not someone who ran, and he said I know, that's why I did it, and she did not understand this at the time and she does not understand it now but she has kept the sentence.
She puts the glasses in the box.
She takes the race glass out of the box.
She puts it back.
The light is changing. She can feel it more than see it — the warmth thinning, the window starting to let go of the afternoon. The kitchen will be cold soon. Not cold. Unwarmed. The distinction matters because cold is a thing that happens and unwarmed is a thing that stops.
The knock.
She hears it and her body responds before her mind does — a straightening, a breath caught and held, the way you hold a breath when you are somewhere you are allowed to be but do not feel allowed to be.
She goes to the door.
The woman in the hallway is sixty, maybe. Short hair, a cardigan with a button missing. She looks at her with an expression that is not unfriendly but is careful.
"I'm sorry to bother you. Are you — did you know him?"
"He was my brother."
The woman nods. She expected this, or something like this. "There's a smell of gas in the hall. I think it might be coming from in here. From his — from the apartment."
She turns and looks back at the kitchen as though the kitchen might explain itself.
"I can check," she says.
"It's been there a few days. Maybe longer. I wasn't sure who to call."
"I'll check."
The woman lingers. "He was quiet. I don't mean that as — I just mean he was quiet. We didn't talk much. I wish we had."
She nods because she does not trust what will come out if she opens her mouth to this particular sentence.
The woman leaves.
She goes back to the kitchen. She checks the stove. The burners are off. She turns one on and it clicks, clicks, catches. Blue flame. She turns it off.
She kneels and opens the cabinet beneath the stove. The smell is there — faint, sweet in the way that signals something wrong. A leak somewhere, small, the kind that doesn't announce itself. The kind that accumulates.
She should call someone. She should call the landlord. She should call the gas company. She should leave the windows open and go.
She stands up and opens the window. All the way. The evening pushes in — cooler than she expected, smelling of the street, of someone else's dinner. She stands there with her hands on the sill and feels the air pass through the kitchen the way air passes through a room that is being emptied whether she empties it or not.
Then she takes out her phone. She finds the landlord's number. She dials it and it rings four times and goes to voicemail and she says: "There's a gas leak. In the kitchen. Beneath the stove. I've opened the window. You should call someone before the morning." She hangs up. She has done the thing she can do. It does not feel like enough. It does not feel like anything.
The spoon is still in the mug.
The jacket is still on the chair.
The tickets are on the counter in a line she did not mean to arrange but which has arranged itself, earliest to latest, left to right, like reading, like the direction you go when you are trying to make sense of something.
She could finish. There is not much left. The drawer is mostly empty now. The cabinets would take ten minutes. She could put everything in the box and carry the box downstairs and put it in the trunk of the car she borrowed and drive the forty minutes home and the kitchen would be cleared and the landlord would change the locks in the morning and the apartment would become someone else's apartment and the kitchen would become someone else's kitchen and the window would hold someone else's afternoon.
Or.
She puts the bills back in the drawer.
She takes them out of the box one at a time. The phone bill from March. The electric, January through April, in order. The recycling letter. The menu with the phone number that is not his. She puts them back not where they were but close. Close enough.
The tickets she puts back too.
She closes the drawer. It resists again, and she pushes until it gives, and the sound it makes is the sound of a sentence ending in the middle.
She picks up the box. The two glasses are still inside — the only things left. She takes them out and puts them back in the cabinet.
The box is empty now.
She carries it to the door.
She stops at the kitchen doorway. The light is almost gone but not gone. The mug with the spoon. The jacket. The window open wide, the air moving through.
One more night. As if the apartment is asking, though it isn't. Apartments don't ask.
She turns off the light. Then she turns it back on because he would have left it on. He left everything on. Lights, faucets, conversations. He left everything running and walked away and came back when he came back and sometimes he came back.
She leaves the light on.
She pulls the door shut behind her and it locks with a sound that is smaller than she expected, and she stands in the hallway where the gas smell is or isn't, where the neighbor heard something or imagined it, and she holds the empty box against her chest with both arms the way you hold a thing that contains nothing and weighs exactly that.