The house takes a day to dismantle. Goodwill gets the furniture. Meghan sets a ground rule for the rest: George is allowed three seconds to decide where each thing should go: in the car (to be driven back to their apartment), in the trash, or on the weighted-down tarp out front, set up for neighbors to take what they want. Most don't take anything, but some stop by to drop off foil covered casserole dishes. George has known them for years. Now they see him twofold—as a boy and a man at once.

 

It feels strange to be clearing the house, clearing away traces of his mom, just when he wants to hold on to her most. The exertion is distracting, and sometimes he forgets, while filling and hefting trash bags, what he is actually doing. Then, every so often, it hits: the loss that has left him unanchored in the world.

 

On breaks, George walks around the house, listening to the familiar creak of the floorboards under his feet a few final times. Soon the house will be reshaped; repainted, recarpeted, and remolded around the lives of a new family (the zeros on his student loan balance have melted away). It is like the house is holding its breath until then. Or perhaps that's just him.

 

They work their way from the bottom to the top of the house, reaching the attic as the day is drawing in. George follows Meghan up the fold-down ladder. In the darkness under the rafters, she casts about with a torch, light skimming over piled up boxes and sheet-covered shapes. They sift through separately until she calls to him. In her hands is a canvas, thick with oil paint. Propped against the slant of the roof are more canvases, enough for a wall in an art gallery. George does not recognize them or the landscapes they show—dense forests that give way to raggedy mountaintops, ascents and descents threaded together by a road. He flips through them like they are records in a record store. In the bottom right corner of each one is a date in his mom's hand. Are these places she visited? Places she imagined?

 

She drew him birthday cards every year, cartoon dogs or superheroes traced from the covers of his comic books, but he can't remember her painting. Still, the sight of the canvases shifts something inside him. Between the big snapshot memories of learning to drive, graduating college, and meeting Meghan, are foggier ones, memories out of focus. Like a turpentine smell he would sometimes wake to in the night. And his mom's occasional absences, when he would come home from school and think she was out, only for her to appear as he was putting together jelly sandwiches.

 

Meghan doesn't make him decide what to do with the paintings in three seconds. But she does squeeze his hand and say, "I wish we had space."

 

He thinks of their apartment—smaller than the last one they rented. Then he thinks of their car, heaped high with books, photo albums, and clothes that smell painfully familiar. Meghan can barely see out of the rearview mirror when she drives them away from the house and toward the interstate. George sleeps in the passenger seat. In his dreams, he follows an oil paint road.