After the Funeral

The strangest part is the ordinary: how the fridge still hums its one note, how the bills arrive addressed to someone who will never open them. We divided the labour of grief the way we divided everything: my sister took the clothes, I took the paperwork, my brother took the garage and came back holding a fishing rod none of us knew existed and a box of letters from a woman named June who none of us had met. It turns out a life, disassembled, does not resemble the life. A kitchen, emptied of its person, is just a room with knives. We sat on the porch that evening drinking the wine he'd been saving for something, unable to say what the something was, unable to stop pouring, unable to go inside where his absence had made itself at home more thoroughly than he ever did.