Our furniture was mostly borrowed or made of particle board, so we left it behind. Even so, we needed to weed out some possessions. Since both of us had pack-rat tendencies, it wasn’t easy—especially when it came to books. When we got to the sixth box, Jamie gave me a look and said, “Come on, Grace. Do you really need the entire Little House on the Prairie series?”
“Grammy gave me those for my ninth birthday.”
“Okay, fine. But do you still read them?”
“Do you still read the Hardy Boys?” I asked, picking up a tattered copy of The Haunted Fort.
“Hey, those were my dad’s books. I can’t throw them away. Besides,” he said, grabbing the book before I could toss it into the giveaway pile, “this book has everything—a stolen art collection, death threats, and ghosts. The Hardy Boys are going to Portland. All of them.”
“Then so are Laura and the rest of the Ingalls family.”
Jamie picked another book out of the box. “What about this? You’ve read it so many times you must have the story memorized by now.”
“No way. Jo March is the sister I never had.” I held up another volume. “What about this one?”
Jamie’s eyes bugged out of his head. “Are you crazy? Dune is like the greatest book of all time. A classic! Dune insists that magic and fact are knit together in everything. It urges us to examine the miraculous alongside the mundane and see they are all of a piece. Plus, it has sandworms!”
“Okay, fine. So we’ll bring that one too. And all the Harry Potters,” I said. “We both love those.”
In the end, we packed them all.
To make up for the weight, I left behind a lot of the dishes. They were mostly mismatches anyway, things I’d picked up cheap at yard sales. It was a good thing I’d never been much of a cook.
That entire box was packed with books that Jamie and I had read and loved, familiar titles we just couldn’t leave behind. However, at the very bottom of the box was a pristine, unread volume given to me by my cousin Melody not long before we moved, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. I set it on top of the stack of books before flattening the box for recycling.
Later that night, I picked it up and brought it to my bed—a mattress and box spring on the floor—planning to read just a few pages before falling asleep. At 2:38 after Maisie opened one eye and let out an irritated snuffle to let me know I was disturbing her beauty sleep, I finally turned out the lights.
The next day, I woke up at noon, pulled on some yoga pants, and took Maisie for a walk. I didn’t even bother to brush my hair, still frizzed and frightening from my trek through the rain. Returning home, I climbed back into bed with my dog, a bowl of Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch, and the book.
That was pretty much the agenda for the next two days—I hid under the covers with Maisie snuggled up beside me, ate stuff that was salty-sugary-crunchy-creamy and devoid of all nutritional value, and read the heart-wrenching tale of Louisa Clark and Will Traynor.
Upon closing the cover, I sobbed and shook my fist at the universe, cursing its cruelty to star-crossed lovers whose love is cut short. But mostly, I cried. For another three days, between trips to the bathroom and walks for the dog, I lay in my bed, a tangle of sheets and blankets sanded with crumbs from carelessly consumed snacks, and in a way I had never allowed myself to do in those whole two years since Jamie’s fall, I mourned, finally letting the truth of Jamie’s death sink into my soul.
When I woke on the third day I had no more tears but a strange sense of being . . . grounded, reattached to the earth and my life upon it. But what did that life look like if Jamie wasn’t in it? What was I going to do now?
I had no idea. But I decided to begin by taking Maisie for a walk.
* * *
Come June, Washington Park would be a riot of roses. That was one of the first sights Jamie and I saw upon moving to Portland, because everyone said you should, and they were right. Mid-April was too soon for flowers, but the subtle rise of temperature and lengthening of days had roused the rosebushes from sleep. The branches were as high as my waist and lush with leaves. While Maisie snuffled the grass and pranced along the edge of the flowerbeds, yipping at lackadaisical, utterly unimpressed squirrels, I leaned close and studied the green rosebuds, closed but plump, edged with delicate, almost imperceptibly thin ribbons of red, yellow, pink, and white, a whispered clue, a promise of summer and longer, warmer, better days to come.
All that snuffling, prancing, and yipping wore Maisie out, so I picked her up and carried her home, down Twenty-third Street with the trendy boutiques and shops I still couldn’t afford to enter, especially when I considered the limits of a two-month severance and how far I could stretch it.
To avoid temptation, I altered my route and took a street that was new to me. The church that I passed, a turn-of-the-century cut stone structure with heavy oak doors and a squat, square bell tower, housed a thrift shop, open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays.
The shop was
