I’d come downstairs for a glass of water at 10:00 at night and find them sitting at the kitchen table, and they’d look up with an expression I can only describe as interrupted, like I was the interruption.
I drove to Savannah telling myself it was just tension.
Everybody goes through stretches where the household feels tight. I’d been that age once. I knew how it felt to want your space back.
I wasn’t unreasonable about it.
I came back to Charlotte on a Tuesday afternoon and pulled into the driveway, and something was wrong before I even got out of the truck.
The flower pots Lorraine’s sister had given me were gone from the front steps.
I’d kept those pots for 8 years. I’d moved them three times. They had small chips in the rim that I’d filled with wood filler and repainted.
Little repairs I’d done on a Sunday afternoon while listening to a ball game.
I stood in the driveway looking at the empty steps for a long moment before I went inside.
Except I couldn’t go inside.
My key didn’t work.
I tried it twice. The way you do when you don’t want to believe what’s already happened.
Turned it back and forth. Applied a little pressure. Checked to make sure I had the right key.
I had the right key.
The lock was different.
They’d changed the locks while I was gone.
My cell phone showed no missed calls, no message explaining this. No heads up, no conversation, no nothing.
Just a different lock and my flower pots gone from the steps.
I walked around to the backyard. Through the sliding glass door, I could see inside.
And what I saw made my stomach drop in a way I hadn’t felt since I got the phone call about Lorraine.
The guest room door was open. The bed was still there in the dresser, but everything that had been mine was in boxes, cardboard boxes stacked in the hallway.
Some of them were closed with tape. Some of them weren’t, which told me the packing had been hasty, careless.
I’d had a framed photograph of Lorraine on the nightstand for 4 years.
In that photo, she’s standing on the back porch of our old house in Henderson, squinting into the afternoon light, laughing at something I’d said.
I could see the corner of the frame sticking out of one of the open boxes, turned face down.
I don’t have a word for what I felt in that moment that isn’t embarrassing to say out loud.
I called my daughter.
Voicemail.