What We Keep

Margaret stood in the center of the kitchen she'd shared with David for twenty-seven years, watching the last of their life together get priced for strangers. The estate sale woman had stuck yellow tags on everything: the wedding china, his baseball card collection from before they'd met, the papaya tree sapling they'd planted together the year they stopped trying to have children.

"You want this?" her sister asked, holding up the ceramic goldfish bowl. "David won it for you at that carnival."

"No."

"Margaret, you loved that thing."

"David loved it. He bought it, remember? He bought it and brought it home like it meant something." She hadn't wanted it then, a cheap trophy from a night he'd spent drinking with coworkers while she sat home alone. "Sell it."

The cat—a marmalade tabby named Buster that David had surprised her with for her forty-fifth birthday—wound between her legs, purring like he didn't know his person was gone. Heart attack, three weeks ago, while she'd been at her mother's funeral. She'd buried them both in the same month.

"Take the cat, at least."

"I can't."

"Margaret, you're being unreasonable."

"I'm not being unreasonable. I'm being honest." She looked around the kitchen. "He bought the cat because he thought I was lonely. He bought the goldfish bowl because he thought it would make me smile. He bought papaya at the market every Sunday even though I hated it because he said it reminded him of our honeymoon. Everything here was him performing love instead of asking me what I actually needed."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" She picked up the price tag on her own coffeemaker. "He's been gone three weeks and I'm just now realizing I've been living with a stranger who thought I was someone else."

The estate sale woman walked in with a clipboard. "Someone's offering $500 for the baseball cards."

"Take it," Margaret said. "Take everything."

Buster rubbed against her ankle one last time, then followed her sister toward the door, like he knew which one of them was actually capable of being loved.

Margaret stood alone in the empty kitchen and for the first time in thirty years, she didn't feel guilty about hating papaya.