The Fifteen Dollars in My Father’s Hand

She had not seen the dress. The rack had not come out of the garage until almost eleven.

I opened the hatch of my car. When I turned around, Barb Meyer was coming down the driveway toward me with the four Pyrex bowls nested in her arms.

“These were your mother’s,” she said. “I ate out of that yellow one for twenty years.” She set them in my car and went back up for more.

The woman in the red sweatshirt came next. She had the Christmas tablecloth folded over one arm and the bedroom lamp in the other hand.

“I’m Kathy,” she said. “I was in your mom’s circle at church. We did funeral lunches together.” Her eyes were wet. “She’d have ironed this before she let anybody see it.”

Then it was like something had been decided without anyone saying it. Women I had known all my life, and two I had not, began picking things up off those tables and walking them to the curb. The Corningware. The shoebox of patterns. My mother’s good scissors, the ones we were never allowed to cut paper with. A wooden spoon with a burn on the handle that Barb held up and said, “Hers?” and I said, “Hers,” and into the car it went.

Nobody asked what anything cost.

And nobody was unkind to Sharon. No one said a word to her, cross or otherwise. They simply walked around her, back and forth, carrying a dead woman’s kitchen past her to her stepdaughter’s car, and she stood in the middle of the driveway in her cardigan and let them.

I think that was harder on her than if someone had yelled.

A man in a seed cap pulled up to the curb about then and started up the drive toward the tool table. My father met him halfway.

“Sale’s closed,” he said. “I’m sorry for your trouble.”

Then he walked to the corner, took hold of the stake with the poster board stapled to it, and pulled it out of the ground. He did the same with the one on the side street, and laid them both face down in the garage.

Then he went to the gray cash box, opened it, and counted out thirty-one dollars.

He walked it across the street himself. Mrs. Novak shook her head at him on her own front step for a good while before she took it. She told me the next day she had promised to put it in the plate.

When he came back across, Sharon was waiting for him by the garment rack. I was near enough to hear. I had not meant to be, but I had my mother’s dress over my arm and nowhere to set it down.

“You’ve made a fool of me in front of this whole street,” she said. Her voice shook.

“No,” my father said. “I did that to both of us back in the spring, when I told you I didn’t care what happened to that basement. I cared. I just couldn’t go down those stairs, and I let you think that was the same thing.”

“I asked you three times to go through it with me.”

“You did.”

She took off her reading glasses and let them fall on their chain. For a second she looked older than fifty-seven, and very tired, and not like anybody’s villain.

“I have lived two years in her house,” she said. “I open a drawer for a spoon and it’s her spoon. I hang up my coat and it’s her hangers. My grandsons come to stay and there’s no place to put them, because the whole downstairs is her.” She pressed her lips together. “I wanted one room that was mine. That’s all I wanted. One room.”