The Week the Kids Got the Big Bedroom

Her shirts, her jeans, her nightgowns, even her socks. I did not wad up so much as one dish towel.

I wanted her to find her things the way I would want to find mine.

I carried the baskets down the upstairs hall one at a time. The old wood floor creaks in three places, and by the fourth trip I knew every one of them.

The winter daylight came in white through the window at the end of the hall and lay across the boards.

I was wearing my gray hoodie and my oldest jeans, with my hair pulled back in a ponytail to keep it out of my face.

In the back room, I put her clothes in the same drawers of the same dresser, in the same order.

I hung her coats and her church dress in the little closet under the eaves. I made her bed with her own sheets and set her pillows on it the way she liked them, the big ones at the back.

I put her lamp on the nightstand and her phone charger in the outlet by the bed, and I set the picture of her and the kids at the county fair right where she would see it when she sat down.

I opened the register all the way so the room would be warm.

It was a good room. That was the thing. It was clean and warm and pretty, with a quilt Travis’s grandma made on the bed and a window that looks out over the hay field toward the creek. It just was not the big one.

Lane moved his Legos himself. He carried the tote down the hall like it was a carton of eggs, one small step at a time, and set it under the window in the big room and then sat down next to it and just looked up at the ceiling.

Avery stood in the middle of the big room and turned around in a slow circle.

She looked at the two windows. She looked at the closet. She looked at the place by the register where Travis had said a desk could go if we found one.

“Is this really ours?” she asked him. “Like really? Not just till Mom gets back?”

“It’s really yours,” Travis said. He was kneeling by the bunk bed tightening a bolt, and he did not look up when he said it, which is how I knew he was close to tearing up himself.

Ron came by that afternoon with Judy’s casserole and an old oak school desk he had in the machine shed, the kind with the seat attached.

He carried it up the stairs by himself, set it under the window by the register, and dusted it off with his cap.

“Your great-grandpa did his arithmetic at that desk,” he told Avery. “He was no good at it either.”

And Avery laughed out loud, a real laugh, the first one I had heard out of her since her mother left on Saturday.

Late that afternoon, the two of them sat cross-legged on the hallway floor with a coffee can of old crayons and a big piece of white paper I had found in the hutch.

They were making a sign for their new door. They worked on it for an hour with their heads together.