a box in the basement, and the photographs on the stairs went from twelve to four, and the afghan Mom used to fall asleep under on the couch went to the cedar chest and then, at some point I never saw, went away entirely. Every time, she had a reason. The mugs were chipped. The photographs were crooked. The afghan was a fire hazard by the woodstove. Every time, the reason was true. That was the hardest part. You can't fight a reason that's true. You can only stand in the kitchen and feel the house getting a little more like a hotel.
Dad didn't fight it either. When I complained, he'd rub the back of his neck the way he does and say, "She's trying to make a home, June. Give her a little room." And I wanted to say, She's making room by taking it from us, but I didn't, because I could see he was happy, or something near it, for the first time in four years, and I didn't want to be the thing that took that away.
Then Grandma Ivy got sick.
It was lung cancer, though she had never smoked a day in her life, and it went fast, the way they told us it would. She was seventy-nine. She refused the hospital in Lexington and went into hospice in her own front room, in a rented bed set up where the quilt frame had always been, and for six weeks that winter Dad drove out to Calloway Branch Road every single evening after work. Sometimes I went with him. More often I had homework, or a shift at the Dairy Queen, or I just couldn't stand it, and I'd say so, and he'd nod and go alone. He'd come home at ten or eleven, smelling like her house, woodsmoke and Vicks and the cold, and sit in his truck in the driveway for a long time before he came in.
She died in February, on a night it snowed. At the funeral at Harlow Fork Methodist, they sang "In the Sweet By and By" and "I'll Fly Away," and the women from the quilting circle sat together in the third pew in their good dresses, six old women in a row, and wept with their whole bodies, and I remember thinking I didn't know Grandma Ivy had that many friends.
After that, the quilt was all I had of her that I could put my hands on. Grandma's house went to an estate sale in April. Carla organized it, and she was good at it. Dad got some money from it, not much. Most