She looked me up and down. I was wearing my cleanest jeans and a sweater I’d bought at the
thrift store the week before. I had my hair pulled back in a ponytail. I’d put on mascara, and then taken it off, because I was afraid I’d cry again and it would run.
“Come in, Carly,” she said.
She showed me the house. The long front hall with the wooden floors. The living room with the fireplace and the big piano nobody played. The formal dining room with a table long enough for
twelve people. The kitchen, which was huge and old-fashioned, with white cabinets and a black-and-white checkered floor. The four bedrooms upstairs. The three bathrooms, one with a claw-foot tub.
“My husband and I bought this house in 1971,” she said as we walked. “We raised our daughter here. Susan. She lives in Oregon now. My husband passed away two years ago.” She said it simply,
the way you’d tell someone the time. “The house is too big for one person. But I’m too stubborn to leave it.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. And I meant it.
“It’s a lot of dust,” she said. “That’s what it is.”
