The Spotless House We Left Behind

The cleaning

I don’t think either of us decided it out loud. We just stood in the empty basement at noon and looked at each other, and Natalie went up and got the bucket from under the sink.

We cleaned that house like we were going to be graded on it.

Natalie did the oven first. It hadn’t been cleaned since Easter, when Faye had done a ham and the glaze had run over. She sprayed it and let it sit and scrubbed it with a pad until the glass on the door was clear enough to see the racks.

I rented a carpet shampooer from the hardware store in Brandon and did the whole basement, bedroom and sitting room both, and then the stairs. I went over the stairs twice, because the kids had spilled grape juice on the third one from the bottom and nobody had ever gotten it out.

It came out on the second pass. I stood there and looked at it longer than I needed to.

Natalie did the bathrooms, upstairs and down. She did the inside of the fridge, and wiped down every one of Faye’s oak cabinet doors, inside and out, and put the spices back in alphabetical order, the way her mom liked them.

I mowed the lawn and edged it along the driveway. I cleaned out the gutters, though they didn’t need it. I took the trash and the recycling out to the curb even though pickup wasn’t until Tuesday, because that was my box on the chart, and I wanted to be able to say I’d done it.

By four in the afternoon the house smelled like lemon and fresh-cut grass.

Then Natalie walked over to the fridge with a pen.

She looked at the chart for a long time. Then she started at the top and checked off every box with her name in it, every day, clear through the end of June. Cooking. Dishes. Bathroom. She did mine too. Lawn, trash, gutters.

When she got to the bottom, she capped the pen and set it in the little tray.

She left the letter on the kitchen island, right where Brittany always sat with her coffee. She put her house key on top of it. I put mine next to hers.

Then she went to the freezer and put in a nine-by-thirteen pan of tater tot hotdish, covered in foil, with “Wade and kids, 350 for an hour” written on the foil in marker.

We stood in the doorway to the garage and looked at the kitchen one more time. Morning light was long gone. Late sun was coming in low over the oak cabinets and the empty sink.

“It’s nice,” Natalie said. “It’s really nice.”

“It is,” I said.

She pulled the door shut behind us, and it locked on its own.

The first night

The farmhouse didn’t have curtains yet. It didn’t have much of anything yet. We’d put the bed frame in the bedroom and realized we’d left the bolts in a coffee can in her parents’ garage, so the mattress went on the floor.

We ate cold sandwiches sitting on it. We didn’t have chairs.

It was warm out, June warm, and we’d opened every window in the house. The cottonwoods were letting go of their fluff, and it drifted in through the screens and settled on the floor like snow.

Out in the ditch along the road, the frogs were going so loud it sounded like an engine idling.

Sometime after ten, lying there in the dark, Natalie started laughing.

It started small. Just a breath through her nose. Then she put her hand over her face and laughed out loud, and then she couldn’t stop.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. I don’t have to make anybody breakfast tomorrow.”

And she laughed until she was crying, and then she laughed some more. I lay there next to her on that mattress on the floor and listened to it.

I hadn’t heard that laugh in months. Maybe longer. I hadn’t noticed it was gone until it came back. I think that’s the thing that still gets me, all this time later. I’d been drying dishes beside her every morning for two years and I hadn’t noticed.

I reached over in the dark and found her hand, and she held on.