Chapter 28: The Clean-Out

"Yes," I said. "We'll take it."

"You're sure? Given the history."

"Ma'am, I'm the only mover in Nashville with the receipts for that house."

The second Monday in March, two Kitt trucks backed up the drive in Belle Meade.

The same drive. The same white columns. The same double staircase through the front door.

The bank's agent met us on the porch with a clipboard and a ring of keys.

"Everything inside goes to storage, then to sale," she said. "Personal papers and photographs go back to the former owner."

"Yes, ma'am," Wilma said. "We know how that works."

I opened the front door.

The house echoed.

The chandelier still hung over the hall, dusty now, two bulbs out.

Under it stood the one folding chair. Somebody had put a coffee mug on the seat and left it there.

"Well," my oldest mover said. "He did use the chair."

Brantley had bought a few things after I left.

A black leather sectional in the den. A television the size of a garage door.

A home gym in the dining room, where my table for twenty used to be.

Upstairs, in our old bedroom, stood a new bed. Bigger.

Nobody had ever slept in it. The plastic was still on the mattress.

My youngest mover looked at it, then at me.

"Inventory it," I said. "Same as everything."

He wrote it down.

We worked the way we always work. Room by room. Every item on a sheet, every sheet signed.

At eleven, a gray sedan with a dent in the door pulled up at the curb.

It wasn't a Range Rover. The Range Rover had gone back to the dealer in January.

Brantley got out and stood at the bottom of the drive.

He wore jeans and an old Vanderbilt sweatshirt. He didn't come up.

The bank's agent went down to talk to him. Then she came back up to me.

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