The House I Emptied In A Day

We packed every single thing that belonged to Travis Kellerman. The guitars. The amps. The microphone that cost more than my coat. The boxes of merch that never sold. His clothes, folded neat, because I am my grandmother’s granddaughter and I do not do ugly even when I am done. His posters. His cables. His lucky boots. All of it, packed careful into boxes, loaded into the bed of Sherry’s truck, and driven twelve miles out to his mother’s place, where his mother, who I had always loved and who had always known exactly what her son was, met us at the door and said, “It’s about time, honey,” and helped us stack it in her garage.

Then I came home and I did the other thing.

I called the locksmith out of the county seat, a nice young fella named Petey, and I paid him ninety dollars to change every lock on the house. Front, back, and the cellar. I called the credit union and I went down there in person and I sat across from a loan officer named Brenda who I had gone to high school with, and I took my name off the guitar loan as a cosigner, which I could do because Travis had missed enough payments that they were glad to restructure it into his name alone. I closed the joint checking account we barely used and I opened a new one with only my name on it. I called the propane company and the electric and the internet and I put everything in my name only, which it mostly already was, and I told them if a man named Travis Kellerman ever called to make changes, the answer was no.

It took me the whole day. By the time the sun was going down over the corn, the house was mine again. Empty of him. Clean. Quiet in a good way for the first time in nine years. I sat on the porch with a cup of coffee and I waited, and I was not nervous, and I was not sad. I was the calmest I had been since I was a girl.