what i didn’t take

rhienna renÈe guedry

I thought of two things when I found out that the Zimmerman’s home had gone down in flames: first, that I would’ve saved my hour and forty-five minutes Q-tipping the dust off each picture frame on the mantle if I had known the entire house would become dust itself just an afternoon later, and secondly, that I wish I had stolen something other than their silver-plated wine stopper shaped like a starfish.

All that is supposedly left of the house on Peony Street is a chimney, soot and blackness—like the asphalt turned itself inside out—and the Zimmerman’s antique, stainless steel toaster in perfect condition, as if it was the last item standing at a garage sale and is now free for the taking. At least this is what I’ve been told.

Let me start over: I’ve never stolen anything valuable. My latex-gloved hands have polished silverware worth more than my annual earnings, have dusted behind vases hundreds of years old that are often stuffed with cash, as though any thief or house cleaner wouldn’t expect to find a neatly-tied roll of hundred dollar bills in a porcelain orifice, shining under a spotlight. I have assigned the same unceremonious care scrubbing the rim of a second-floor toilet as I have buffing out fingerprints from a silver serving tray for hors d’oeuvres, never being tempted by objects of status—though I am aware of their importance to those who possess them.

What I have taken: a canvas grocery bag with the faux-leather handle, which I found a family of baby mice nesting in. A wooden cutting board with the unsanitary, deep ridges a knife doesn’t forget. The lime green tennis racket. The ceramic butter dish covered in blue flowers from the back of the refrigerator. A package of cloth diapers from after the miscarriage. Eleven pencils, collected over time, each with unused erasers and perfectly-sharpened tips. The navy pair of broken glasses with one taped arm. A pair of tiny nail clippers from Italy after they fell into the toilet. The fuzzy green pipe cleaner that, twisted around the loop of a candy cane with googly eyes, made antlers for a child’s stocking at Christmas. A collector’s edition issue of Vogue magazine kept in the bathroom, taken after it turned to waves of pulp by an open shower curtain. Seven unique socks that never paired up with their mates, stacked for an entire season on top of the washing machine.

The lure of taking unceremonious things has been thick since my childhood. From our neighborhood Montgomery Ward, I plucked the tags off leather purses: tiny flags of leather that boasted, in serifed stamped branding, “This purse is 100% leather.” (Could something ever be 80% leather? If so, what would the other 20% be?) At nine, I didn’t even want a purse, yet my collection of leather purse tags grew large enough to fill a pickle jar. I kept my secret under my bed, and added new acquisitions when I could.

This jar, of course, was exactly how my mother found out what I’d been doing while she dove through clearance endcaps for blouses two sizes too small for her to fit into the next hopeful summer. Cleaning one afternoon, she knocked the jar over with her vacuum hose, which quickly gobbled up two, six, eleven leather tags from the floor with a WHOOSFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF, sucking dryly at them like leaves caught in a storm drain.

Memory tells me she dragged me into the store by the tip of my ear, making me apologize to a bored salesgirl in a beige smock as I handed over a jar full of the remaining useless leather swatches sorted by size and color. Poor thing; I now recognize she was likely faced with two options: throw the contents of the jar away after my mother and I left the store or tell her boss—undoubtedly a round, nervous little man with hairy knuckles—who’d ask her to stay after close to match up the leather samples to their mother-purses, snapping the tags all back on. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. By the end of the night, her fingers would be blistered at the tips. Whom taught whom a lesson?

I wake up early because I have to, what with the dawn seeping through my bedroom window, and two cats that seem to know how to tell time. They are only interested in making noise like a complaint card at six forty-five in the morning and again after seven, never to be heard from again, even at mealtime, even during a luxurious petting.

I get up and put the kettle on, take the paper from the front step, though I rarely read it, and shower, but I rarely bathe. I believe in the efficiency of 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner combinations; bar soap that you can use on your face and everywhere else; a hot water heater that putters out after thirteen minutes, before things get too exciting.  I spend three mornings a week cleaning three different houses and follow up with two of the most anal retentive of clients another afternoon a few days later.

The high-strung anal retentive clients are bona fide matriarchs; they could be sisters. Franke Nesthouse likes her oven cleaned monthly, even though she never bakes; likes mail sorted by shape and size, even though she promptly flicks the stack into the garbage; walks her condo with me before I am sent home to be sure that I was still “giving it my all” and not “getting too comfortable.” Franke is a divorced single mother of one whose teenage daughter’s room is off limits to both of us, who works in advertising and complains about “the stress” while self-medicating with a bottle of Pinot Noir, nightly, except for those four months during her pregnancy. Franke confessed to me one afternoon that both of her pregnancies had been “strategic actions without birth control” between herself and “unknowing strangers with excellent bone structures,” but she never spoke of either encounter—or any suitor or partner of any kind for that matter—again.

Christina Moss leaves a list on the refrigerator of things she hopes I won’t forget. Even though the list rarely changes details, she signs and dates it each time, sometimes making cartoonish “Os” like smoke rings hovering above the two i’s in her name; sometimes short-handedly writing “Xtina” with a big giant “X” like the mother elephant—clutching a writing utensil with her trunk—writes to sign her name in the movie Dumbo. I have never seen or met Christina’s husband, though evidence of his existence (one tube sock with a blue mouth under the bed, a razor and shaving cream left out but without any shaving trimmings in the sink) sometimes made me question whether it was her husband, another man, or Christina’s desire to make it appear as though someone lives with her by scattering the suggestion of masculine things.

The Zimmermans, on the other hand, aren’t high-strung or micromanaging, though they can be meticulous, and confessed to pre-cleaning before I came over if they were “too embarrassed” to let anyone, even a cleaner, know they “lived like that.” Isaac said once that he knew he had ascended class when he and his husband budgeted for a cleaning service and still found the resources to travel internationally twice a year. While Isaac wore freshly-pressed suit jackets and worked in business (though he never mentioned exactly what type), Javier stayed at home and thought about the new paintings he wanted to create. Javier took Isaac’s last name to piss off his Cuban family; thirteen generations of handsome-and-womanizing Albuerne men whose lineage was halted equally by his homosexuality as his vehement disinterest in homonormativity. 

The worst moments in my line of work aren’t de-clogging a bathtub drain or excavating the contents of a soggy, torn garbage bag: it’s acquiring new business. Selling myself has never been one of my strong suits, and it’s not for lack of self-confidence. The game feels counterfeit, no matter how it’s played: if I do it well, I spend my walk home wearing my false smile like a grotesque mask stuck to my face with the glue burning; if it goes poorly, I retrace every word of the conversation, every strange phrase that exited my mouth like a runaway cable car. If my social skills were a movie, they’d probably be Thelma & Louise. 

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when things spiral out of control, but any well-meaning conversation can go from zero to crazy, like when my energy accelerates from enthusiasm to unbridled desperation and loneliness. I overshare; I pathologically lie and those tales become too involved and cumbersome, large-legged things knocking knees into the corners of the room. Normal or well-adjusted people can detect these moments on a dime, like an accent or affectation: something here is different. 

Thankfully—and I hear this from a reputable source—people will not notice how awkward I am if I don’t call attention to it. I challenge myself with silence. Every time I am out in the world, I practice. A cashier at the grocery store says, “Hello, how’s it going?” and instead of filling the air above me with squawking birds, I smile demurely and lock my teeth to hold the words in. I claw at my palms to keep my worst outburst—“last time I bought this artichoke dip I had diarrhea for a week!”—to myself. You can’t undo those kinds of statements, and I speak from experience.

Instead, I have gotten really good at asking questions. People, especially rich people, love it when you ask them about themselves; if their answers are greeted with careful, slow nods and pleasant half-smiles, they often forget about reciprocity.

I consider this a best-case scenario.

It’s interesting in which ways I can personify a clean house to a stranger. If you stop to think about it for a minute, it’s ridiculous to think you’d want any living person to be so meticulous that you feel comfortable allowing them entrance to all your private places. But you see, that’s just how the world works: these people want to see short, manicured fingernails (even though a manicure is near impossible to maintain when you spend most of your days using your fingers to pry, scrape, wash, wipe, tie, pluck, and scrub), canine teeth that match the ivory of your other teeth when you smile, clothes that are solid-colored and forgettable. They want to believe you have everything under control so that you can help them get everything under control, too.

New clients usually come by way of recommendations. In the eleven years I’ve been doing this, there’s been a strange symmetry: when a client receives word that they’ll be relocating for work at the end of the month, I invariably receive a cold call or a referral for a new client who just can’t take the reality of their own bad habits anymore. It’s like that old saying about how when God closes one door He opens another (except I’ve never been much of a Believer, so the idea of some all-knowing bearded man playing with the entrances and exits to anyone’s given life seems kind of sick).

I have juggled as many as seven clients and survived on as few as one. Three seems to be a sweet spot, what with Franke and Christina’s twice-weekly appointments.

Now that the Zimmerman’s house has burned to the ground,  I guess it’s no longer appropriate to say that the two “got along like a house on fire.” I’ll have to remember that.

What’s great about my job is that I don't have to talk to anyone, and when I do, I am mostly expected to be focused; friendly, but curt. If the conversation is too boring or too hard to keep up with, it is acceptable to apologize and say, “I’m sorry, I was focusing a little too intently on scrubbing this caked-on chocolate syrup off your cabinets, what did you say again?” My intense sudsing—me on my hands and knees—is proof I’m well worth the money, and besides, I’m not getting paid to clean and be their therapist.

Today, my younger sister Mar meets me for Mexican food next to my go-to sushi restaurant, the one I feel self-conscious about walking by and not patronizing (but paradoxically self-conscious that I eat there as often as I do). She’s late and I’m early, as usual.

I’m relieved to see that the sushi bar’s blinds are closed. It's their customary two-hour hiatus between lunch and dinner, where the sushi chefs sharpen knives or pick up fresh fish at the market. I breathe a sigh of relief that I don’t have to wave and grin maniacally to the woman who holds the door open for the patrons coming in, who would undoubtedly have made eye contact with judgmental undertones lapping around her retinas. I guess it’s possible that I read too much into things.

When Mar walks into the Mexican joint Brava-Bravo, she is dressed for work without apology. Under her grey oversized hooded sweatshirt with the letters DKNY embellished in rhinestones, I can see lace and ribbons in lavender and lime, booty shorts barely longer than the hoodie itself. It’s spring, after all, but she’s dressed like an Easter egg in panties. Sometimes it’s surprising that we’re related.

Mar wants to be an actress. She’s going to end up being one of those extras that’s only cast as an extra because she’s husky, even though she’s trying time after time to go after lead roles in romantic comedies. Like anyone larger than a size 12, and with no real issue with wearing lingerie on stage in front of a room full of strangers, Mar got into burlesque to put herself through college. Crowds and strangers do not intimidate her. Small talk doesn’t feel like a funeral to her. There are no backstage pep talks before she performs or goes out for an audition. She goes to see movies alone without feeling like she’s being followed by the man three rows behind her, or judged by the ticket-taker. I could say Mar got the looks and I got the brains, but I think she maybe got them both, and I got just enough to get by.

One table over, a man with a wedding ring is biting into a huge burrito, but he can’t help but watch her unzip her hoodie and tie her dark hair back; if she were facing him like I am, she’d probably smile at him before letting it fade dramatically, like a dried-up river bed. He probably is chewing each bite wondering the exact point in his marriage where his wife would have gone from charmed to offended if he brought home something like that for her to wear.

The server comes by to see if we’re ready to order. As a rule, Mar never finishes her food and doesn’t “believe in” leftovers. Typically, I end up scarfing hers down an hour after I get home, emotionally eating through what is left in the Styrofoam container because there just isn’t room to store it in my refrigerator. Knowing this, I order something small but deep fried, while Mar goes for the two entrees she wants a few bites of.

“The Zimmerman’s house burned down,” I say.

“God, that’s too much,” she frowns. “Terrible. Have you been by?”

“I was thinking of sending a card, but of course, what address would I use?”

“Just call them.”

“That seems so uncomfortable. Like I’m putting them on the spot.”

“Getting a ‘sorry about your fire’ Hallmark card is incredibly uncomfortable. You’re their employee, have been for years now. You’re practically friends—”

“We’re not friends. Conflict of interest, professional integrity, and all that. I know all their dirt. I know where they keep their sex toys. You don’t want a friend like that at parties, constantly worrying about what I might unknowingly say to a coworker. Loose cannon. You know me.”

“So you haven’t gone? I’ll drive you. I want to see it.”

“I’m sure it’s barricaded. Besides, what is there to see?”

“Soot. What was and isn’t. The exposed wiring. I don’t know, I’ve never seen a building immediately after a fire before.”

“There’s nothing left but the chimney.”

“You should call them.”

“I just can’t.”

“When were you next supposed to be by to clean?”

“Tonight.”

“Oh. See? You need to call them. They obviously won’t be thinking about calling you to tell you your services are no longer needed.” Mar pauses, tears a napkin corner, and sops up the small puddle of condensation on the table. “God, I wonder if their dogs made it out alive.”

“I was thinking I would wait until this evening, about forty-five minutes after I would be over there cleaning, pretend I took the bus over and saw what was left of the house and wanted to call on my cell phone, but my battery was dead, so I ended up writing an email instead.”

“Why does everything you do—that could be so straightforward—have to be so damn complicated and fucked up?”

I think Neil Young's “Man Needs a Maid” ruined what we do for a lot of people. And by a lot of people, I suppose I just mean the percentage of people aged forty to fifty-five who have actually listened to the words of that song. So some balding, plaid-wearing, hunchbacked Canadian who probably never has scrubbed behind his ears wants “someone to keep my house clean, fix my meals, then go away.” Man Needs A Maid: An Exercise In Learned Helplessness. I should update my resume with this as the byline.

I take Mar’s advice and call the Zimmermans after lunch. A man who introduces himself as Javier’s brother takes my call, keeping me on the phone for two minutes and thirty-two seconds as I try to sound like a person who didn’t spend an hour rehearsing what I would say when I called. Staring at the notepad full of scribbled notes, I decide to go against what I have written. I do not ask if they’d like me to clean the extended-stay hotel where they’re situated with the dogs while they try to sort through the wreckage of their life. Instead, I shake my head side to side and pucker my mouth like he can see me, and say, “I see. I see. I see.”

I take the bus to Franke Nesthouse’s condo early enough to walk the seventeen blocks each way to where the Zimmerman’s house used to stand. It’s just to see if it’s still steaming, the way burned down spaces do in movies, or if I would know how to navigate the ghost walls of their former house when standing in the middle of blackened ruins. As expected, the lot is barricaded with flimsy yellow tape tied sloppily around the metal fence posts on either ends of the lot. The chain link fence that used to run the parameter of the house is flattened down to the sidewalk, like the house fell on it or a fire truck rolled over it. There is nothing behind the yellow “DO NOT CROSS” tape—it looks like the finish line of a marathon in Hell.

I shift my weight from foot to foot in the open space that used to be the kitchen. I notice a crushed pile of metal objects: several of the kitchen counter-top appliances wadded together like a giant ball of tinfoil, recognizable by the strange little parts that spidered out—the grilling units from the inside of a toaster, the blade of the Osterizer blender I used to scrub clean after Javier’s morning shakes. It’s like the universe chewed up a couple’s kitchen accoutrements and spit them back out again. Seeing the wad of scrap metal and charred plastic made me sad. I frowned. I felt like a toddler as I became aware of a couple who stopped on the sidewalk to stare at me. Waving felt downright clown-like, so I raised one eyebrow and straightened my mouth as if to say, “Shit Happens,” or “You Just Never Know.” Unresponsive, they turn abruptly and walk away.

I look around one last time. Nothing is steaming, smoking, hot to the touch. That must be something they add for effect on the big screen.

I walk back towards Franke’s building, crossing the river on foot, over the most convenient but most unstable-looking neighborhood bridge. Each time I cross this bridge, I count the number of large cylindrical posts (178) and note that there are smaller runs (12) between each large one; they’re square like those on the staircase of my grandmother’s Michigan craftsman home. I wish I were good enough at math to multiply them in my head, to know just how many skeletal limbs hover over the river to support my path across. I suppose I could just use my calculator at home, but it never feels urgent in the same way once I get there.

The counting is really just a means to distract myself from all the ways I know I could potentially die on this bridge. The trap door of the drawbridge, or the ejection by air and flipping cartoonishly; the wind itself; the man who smells of liquor and feces; the train; the swiftness of the cyclist behind me, the one who rings his bell and passes with only inches to spare.

When I arrive, Franke is day-drinking, but has switched to Pinot Grigio in a tumbler with ice cubes like it’s the thick of summer instead of 67 degrees and overcast outside. She is watching a soap opera with the sound turned down while her stereo plays a male singer-songwriter with a lot of feelings.

“I took the day off,” she begins. She pauses as if she wants to dish with a friend but never takes her eyes off the television. On screen, a glamorous woman with large hair and distractingly gaudy jewelry is having dinner with a man whose eyebrows are more impressive than hers. It’s hard to tell whether they are flirting or breaking up—maybe this is true of soap operas in general?—but by the time I collect the dishes scattered on the counters of the nearby kitchen and open the dishwasher, they are passionately kissing over rare steak on a plate.

Franke doesn’t move the entire two hours I’m there: not for another tumbler of wine, nor to use the bathroom. As I wipe down the handles of the refrigerator and put away the wine key, I notice a mint green lighter with the words “Gotta Have It!” written playfully on the side. I have no idea what this means, but I feel the familiar pull of the tide—this is a treasure, I’ll never remember this phrase if I don’t do it—and I slide the lighter into the pocket of my slacks.

Franke’s staring blankly at the rolling credits.

I take the empty bottle of wine from beside her, sliding it quietly into the blue recycle bin, which is brimming with a proverbial Tour of Italy itself: just empty wine bottles and empty spaghetti jars. “Do you want me to open you another?”

“There’s another white in the door of the refrigerator. It’s already open, but I’ll take it over here, if you don’t mind bringing it over here.”

“Sure thing.” I walk over and hope the mouth of the lighter isn’t poking out from my pocket. Franke’s face, I notice for the first time since arriving, is puffy as if she’s been fighting off allergies. “I’m ready for the walkthrough, whenever you have a second.”

“It’s fine this time. Thank you.”

I switch to a different sushi restaurant this afternoon just to avoid having to hear, “Wow, three times in one week!” As if that could ever be interpreted as a compliment. I know servers are just trying to make you feel at home, but if I wanted someone to qualify how much food I’m eating and how frequently, I’d still live with my mother.

With the restaurant across the street from my place, something happens after I hit my second visit of the week, and I simply cannot bring myself to call the number, pronounce my name clearly to avoid repeating myself, or worse, having to spell it out. There is that familiar pause of a lightbulb going off: ol’ Dump Truck across the street is calling again, ordering food for two but she lives alone. How they haven’t recognized my out-of-state area code or the familiar tonality in my voice (even though I try to change the inflection on the order every time) is beyond me. But no matter how hard I try, my fear is that I sound like a maniac: a woman on an emotional rollercoaster who's not quite sure when the drop will hit, so she keeps her mouth open just in case she needs to let out a “Yip!” or “Hoot!” I sometimes say, “Just a minute!” and act like I’m asking someone in the room with me what they want to order, adding on one more roll.

Table service means at minimum three to four points of contact with my server coming by, while take-out means precisely two: one by phone (and phone is easier than face-to-face), and one after I waddle through the crosswalk to pick it up. I pay by card, leave an unspectacular tip, leave my sunglasses on even if it’s overcast, and say thank you.

It’s a tie for which is worse: the familiar neighborhood sushi bar, or going somewhere new with its own set of customs; the contrast between knowing stares and unknowing stares.

The place I’m willing to venture into today is one of those sushi-go-round joints. While food on a conveyor belt is as close to heaven as I can imagine, it’s no surprise that the rolls are lackluster.

I sit down on a squatty barstool and put my purse on the floor between my ankles. I try to take off my jacket while seated instead of, as I should’ve done, before I sat down. It’s these little moments that make me confident the world is challenging in a way for me that’s unique to other people: normal people would realize this and stand up without deliberation; people like me try to tuck their elbows out of jacket sleeves in slow motion, trying not to flail or sigh or struggle too hard, thinking about it the entire time.

Thirty-three seconds and a few disapproving glances, and my face starts turning turnip as I try to do it all slower, like it’s no big deal. Like I’m not doing anything weird. Only now, I’m clocking over a minute and I still haven’t gotten my shoulder out from my grey blazer. The waiter notices that I’m struggling and stops in his tracks with the glass of ice water he was intending on bringing me; he does a little Texas two-step and fidgets with the napkin dispenser that’s ejected half its contents, using his free hand.

Once released from the one-woman circus act, I start tearing through dish after dish of sushi, thin little sad rolls with too much rice, not enough fish, and a lacking sense of aesthetics.    

In ten minutes, I have a sad little tower of plastic saucers in lavender, light blue, cafeteria creme, and faded orange; in ten minutes I have eaten more sushi than the couple beside me, who I had assumed were watching a flat-screen television over my shoulder until I look behind me and see there’s nothing but a light-up painting of a waterfall. I get the overwhelming sense that they have just come from putting down a pet, or are having the “breakup” conversation after this. I’m tempted to mouth, It’s gonna be alright and rest my palms wide on each of their shoulders, but neither they nor I want this, so I finish my meal, pay for my sushi, and leave in silence.

For days, I dreamed the smell of cinders into nightmares, the dark corners of an inverted sunset like the edges of the frame had caught fire. In another dream, I recognized a field that had been the entrance to a family farm from my childhood, silent and full of doom. There were supposed to be horses, somewhere, but as I stepped closer to the fence, I noticed that the mud underfoot was actually ashes, and just the legs of two beautiful brown horses were there, all singed hair and exposed bone—eight legs like two oak kitchen tables flipped upside down for space in a moving truck. I put my hands to the gate of the fence and jerked back from the heat of it, the sizzling of the skin and the smell of meat, my fingers quickly charred, like hot dogs on a grill.

When I awoke, I felt the nausea of fear and regret: that the Zimmerman’s house fire had somehow been my fault. Had I left an aromatic candle burning, a tiny wick and metal island floating in the shallowness of remaining wax? It had been a chilly spring morning: did I leave an oil-burning heater on in one of the rooms? Had the electricity panel in the basement been overloaded from use? It had, after all, been a three-load laundry day; an all-lights-on affair. Anything could have happened. How does someone determine the start of a fire when all that is left is ash and a pile of scrap metal that used to mean something?

I am at Christina Moss’ home for the second appointment of the week and I have the house to myself. Her note lists the usual concerns (behind the couch, the coffee-stained teaspoons) but an addendum in green ink reads, “Take the glass serving dish on the kitchen table to Goodwill. -CM.”

Here’s what I probably shouldn’t tell you: the last time Christina Moss asked me to take something with me was the vintage tennis racket with which her husband used the handle to hit her. She had left it in the middle of the kitchen table two winters ago, with a yellow post-it note on top of it that read “DONATE THIS,” underlined twice. Once I saw the flecks of crimson on the handle and the tear in the netting, I didn’t have the heart to tell her a donation center wouldn’t want such a thing, so I brought it home with me.

I kept the racquet beside the shoe rack near my front door. Once, a failed blind date I took home anyway asked me, “Oh, do you play?” I said yes.

Months after the Zimmerman fire and I still dreamt of the horse legs. No client calls came, and I floated by, balancing Christina Moss and Franke Nesthouse, snacking on pickles or old food from the backs of their refrigerators to save on money. At home, I took to using a space heater instead of heating the entire apartment. I stopped eating out completely. It’s not rock-bottom, but times are hard.

It’s not that I never thought about taking cash; I think about it all the time. I’ve been in this business long enough to know your reputation precedes you but precisely long enough to learn that anyone privileged enough to not clean it doesn’t know shit about their own home. It took two years and an innocent mistake to realize what I could get away with, and another year before I started taking things purposefully. The first thing was the hair clip. It was pastel blue and to this day it has never seen use.

But there is more to it, of course, than utility. There is always a reason, a calling that tugs on my collar and will not take no for an answer. It has never been about the money; it has never been about the thrill. I like to think about it like this: taking things away can sometimes be a gift I give to people, a way to keep them from remembering things they don’t want to remember. It’s easier than you expect, given that so many people don’t see what is right in front of them, let alone what has been removed.

When I took the diapers, it was to keep Franke from a baby shower gift tumbling out of her pantry when she reached for winter linens, startling her into the memory of her miscarriage, of the baby who came out still and the size of a bird.

I discovered the rats nesting in the canvas bag while Isaac prepared dinner, discreetly twisting the mouth of the bag like a dishrag, so as to not call attention to the situation during dinner time. It never came up, even after.

Franke cut the tip of her ring finger off on the wooden cutting board. Wine, carrots, and an independent film were all involved in the scene. Franke used this as evidence that she had no business cooking, anyway.

The glasses were the same ones that Christina wore around the time of the assault. She stopped wearing them immediately after offering up the racket, so I inferred the rest. The glasses moved from atop the microwave to inside the drawer where she kept old menus and packets of condiments.

The Ceramic butter dish lid that never sat just so; always got bumped by the orange juice and came crashing down to the shelf below, sometimes exposing butter for days, and no one seemed to notice except me. The things you stop seeing.

Tennis racket. The “Gotta Have It!” lighter. Pencils: Number 2 with perfect tips and perfect erasers, some octagonal and school bus yellow, others perfectly cylindrical and deceivingly pen-like. A hair clip that fell behind Christina’s bed, used to pin her hair back when she was on top.

My house is full of things removed from other places. Sometimes I do it because I have to, and sometimes I do it because someone else needs me to, though they rarely even know it. Sometimes I do it to remind myself of the places I have been, and sometimes it’s to allow others to forget.