Fiction

by Scribe Leaf Library · 6 min read · 2 views

Corinne had been putting off the drive for three weeks, which was long enough that the estate agent had started leaving polite, increasingly pointed voicemails about "finalizing the timeline." She finally made the trip on a Tuesday, alone, because her brother Desmond hadn't returned her calls in over a year and she'd stopped expecting him to. Their father's house looked smaller than she remembered, the way houses always do once the person who filled them up is gone. She stood in the driveway for a long moment before going in, keys heavy in her palm, bracing herself the way you brace for cold water. Inside, dust had settled over everything in a way that felt less like neglect and more like the house itself had exhaled and gone still. The kitchen clock had stopped at 4:17, though whether that was the moment of his heart attack or simply the moment the battery gave out, no one had thought to note. She left it. Somehow correcting it felt like a small betrayal. She started in the study, because it was the room she remembered least and therefore the one she could face first. Her father had been a quiet man, an accountant for thirty-one years at the same firm, and his study reflected that same quiet precision — files labeled in his careful block print, a drawer of pens organized by color that no one but him had ever needed to be organized. She found, tucked behind a stack of tax records nobody would ever need again, a manila folder labeled simply "C & D," and her chest tightened before she'd even opened it. Inside were report cards. Hers and Desmond's, going back to kindergarten, every single one, alongside ticket stubs from school plays neither of them remembered being good in, and a stack of photographs that told the story their father had apparently been quietly keeping the entire time — the two of them at six and eight, building a blanket fort in this exact living room; at eleven and thirteen, fighting over a bicycle in the driveway; at nineteen and twenty-one, standing awkwardly apart at their mother's funeral, not touching, not speaking, the beginning of the distance that had somehow never closed since. She sat on the study floor for a long time with that folder in her lap, understanding for the first time that her father had spent three decades quietly documenting a closeness between his children that had actually stopped existing sometime in their twenties, as if keeping the evidence might eventually will it back into being. Her phone buzzed. It was Desmond. She almost didn't answer. Then she did. "I saw you called," he said, without preamble, the way he'd always talked, cutting straight past any pleasantries neither of them had the patience for anymore. "I'm sorry. I've been—" He stopped. "It doesn't matter. Are you at the house?" "I'm at the house." There was a long pause on the line, long enough that she wondered if the call had dropped. "Is it as bad as I think it's going to be?" "Worse," she said honestly. "Better too, somehow. I found a box of stuff. Report cards. Photos. He kept everything, Des. Every single thing, going all the way back." Another pause. "I'll come tomorrow," he said finally. "If that's alright. I know it's late notice." "It's fine," she said, and found, to her own surprise, that she meant it. He arrived the next morning looking older than she expected — more grey at the temples, a tiredness around the eyes that hadn't been there the last time she'd actually looked at him properly, which had been longer ago than either of them wanted to admit. They didn't hug. That wasn't how they worked. But he sat down on the study floor beside her, in the same spot she'd sat the day before, and she handed him the folder without a word. He went through it slowly, the way she had, stopping longest on the funeral photograph — the two of them standing three feet apart, both staring somewhere just past the camera, neither one reaching for the other. "We were terrible to each other that day," he said quietly. "I don't even remember why anymore. I just remember being so angry I couldn't stand next to you." "I don't remember either," she admitted. "I just remember it feeling normal. Like that was just how we were going to be from then on." They spent the rest of the day going through the house together, room by room, the way it probably should have been done from the start — not divided into his pile and her pile, arguing over who got what, but simply sorted, together, into keep and give away and sell, with long pauses whenever something surfaced that neither of them expected: their mother's wedding dress, still in its garment bag; a shoebox of their father's old fishing lures that neither of them had ever seen him actually use; a drawing Corinne had made in second grade, framed, hanging in a hallway she'd walked past a hundred times as a teenager without once noticing it was there. By evening, the study floor was clear and the folder sat, unremarked upon, on top of the box they'd both silently agreed neither of them wanted to sell or discard. Desmond made two cups of tea in a kitchen that still had their father's mismatched mugs in the cupboard, and they sat at the same table where they'd eaten ten thousand ordinary dinners as children, saying very little, needing to say very little. "I don't know how to fix eleven years of barely talking," Desmond said eventually, staring into his mug. "I don't even know exactly when it started." "Neither do I," Corinne said. "But I don't think he ever stopped hoping we'd figure it out. That folder wasn't for us to find after he died. I think some part of him always meant to just hand it to us one day and ask why we'd let this happen." "Would you have listened?" She considered the question honestly, the way it deserved. "I don't know. Probably not, ten years ago. Maybe now." The house sold six weeks later, to a young couple expecting their first child, which felt, to Corinne, like exactly the right kind of ending — a house built for a family, going to another family, the story simply continuing rather than closing. She and Desmond kept the folder. They didn't split it, or photocopy half for each other, or negotiate over who deserved to hold onto it. They just agreed, without much discussion, that it should live wherever they both were, which meant it started making the trip between their two houses every few months, along with a standing dinner they'd started keeping, first out of obligation, and then, slowly, out of something that felt, cautiously, like the thing their father had spent thirty years quietly hoping for. The clock in the study, in the new owners' house now, still reads 4:17. Corinne likes to think about that sometimes — that somewhere in that house, frozen at the exact moment everything changed, there's a small, useless piece of evidence that time can stop and still, eventually, somehow, find a way to start moving again.