"She's helping," Marcus said.
"I help," Denise said. "I also go home. If you are going to put someone in Naomi's house, do it with your eyes open. Amara is going to have a whole life of people telling her who her mother was. Don't outsource the first draft."
He had been angry, because she was right in a register he could not afford. They argued in low voices over sweet potatoes. Amara slept through it. Denise left on Saturday instead of Sunday. She hugged him anyway, hard, and said she would come at Christmas. She did come at Christmas. Claire was there for the afternoon and left before dinner, which everyone pretended was gracious. Amara walked four steps between the sofa and Denise's knees and was so pleased with herself that the room, for ten minutes, forgot its job.
In January Marcus asked Claire to marry him. He did it in the kitchen, not on a knee, because a knee had felt like a performance his dead wife could see. He said, "I don't want to do this alone, and I don't think you want to be a guest in it." Claire cried without covering her face. She said yes. She also said, "I know I am not her," which he took as humility and which was, he understood now on a bedroom rug, a thesis she had been defending ever since.
They married in April at the courthouse, on a Wednesday, because weddings with aisles had seemed like a cruelty. Denise was invited. Denise sent a card and did not come. The card was somewhere, or had been. Marcus had a sick feeling, looking at the stack on the rug, that he knew where.
Claire moved the rest of her things in on a Sunday. She did not ask him to take Naomi's dresses out. She moved them herself, neatly, into a wardrobe box, and labeled the box NAOMI in block letters, and put it in the attic behind the Christmas bins. She told him she had done it so he would not have to. He thanked her. He went up once, touched the tape, and came down. The dresser stayed, because it had been Naomi's grandmother's and because Claire said dark wood was elegant and she had no quarrel with elegant. She had a quarrel, it turned out, with what the wood was asked to hold in the light.
The erasures were small enough to call housekeeping if you were tired.
A drawing Naomi's class had sent, thirty crooked hearts, migrated from the refrigerator to a folder. The folder went into the drawer. Marcus noticed the refrigerator and thought Claire had cleaned. She had. A song Naomi used to play in the kitchen, a piano piece too simple for how much she loved it, disappeared from the speaker's favorites. Amara's bedtime book, the one with the mother duck and the terrible rhyme, was replaced by a book about a bear who cleaned his cave. The bear was fine. The replacement was the point. When Amara pointed at a woman in a grocery store and said Mommy, curious, not grieving, because toddlers point at the world to learn its nouns, Claire said, "That's a story people tell." She said it lightly. She believed, in the car on the way home, that she had protected the child from a confusion. She did not hear how the sentence would harden, by repetition, into a policy.
There were phone calls. Denise called on Sundays. At first Marcus answered, and the conversations were short because Amara was loud and because he did not know how to talk about a marriage that was both real and too fast. Then he started missing the calls. Then Claire, who had the house phone and, eventually, the habit of his cell when he left it on the counter, began to answer. She was courteous. She told Denise that Amara was napping. She told her Marcus was on a site. She told her, in May, that visits were hard on Amara's schedule, and that grief experts, she used the plural as if she kept them on retainer, recommended consistency over stimulation. Denise sent a letter. Then another. Marcus, who had stopped opening mail that was not stamped with a client's logo, did not see them. Claire did. She read them standing at the kitchen island with the drawer already in her mind. She told herself she would give them to him on a calm weekend. Calm weekends did not arrive. The letters went into the drawer beside the condolence cards she had also meant to share, cards that had come in late from people who had not known what to say and had then said it anyway, on paper, which was the old method, the method that could be put in a drawer.
Once, in July, Denise drove up without warning. Claire saw the car from the front window, recognized it from Christmas, and felt her pulse in her teeth. Marcus was in Charlotte. Amara was asleep. Claire met Denise on the porch and did not open the screen enough to count as an invitation. She said Amara had a fever. It was not entirely a lie; Amara had been warm that morning and was not warm now. She said Marcus would be upset to miss her. She said she would have Naomi's sister over properly, soon, with notice, so it would not rattle the baby. Denise looked at her through the screen, at the blonde hair and the polite mouth and the house that had been her sister's, and said, "You don't get to be the door." Claire said, "I live here." Denise left. Amara woke ten minutes later and asked for juice. Claire's hands shook while she poured it. She put the shaking into the drawer with everything else, which is to say she stood in the bedroom and rearranged the stack until it was neat, and neatness made her feel, for an hour, like a person with a plan.