The house smelled the same. That was the first thing she noticed — before the light, before the silence, before the fact of her mother's coat still hanging on the hook by the door as if she had just stepped out and might be back.
She stood in the hallway for a long time. Her husband had offered to come with her and she had said no. She wasn't sure, now, whether that had been the right decision. It was the kind of thing that couldn't be undone.
The kitchen was clean. Her mother had always kept a clean kitchen. There was a dish towel folded on the counter beside the sink, and a single coffee cup inverted on the drying rack, and a bowl of fruit that was beginning, very gently, to turn.
She stood in front of the fruit and looked at it for a while. Two oranges, a banana that had gone soft on one side, a handful of grapes that had started to shrivel. Her mother had bought these. She had stood in the same supermarket they had both stood in a hundred times, and she had picked up each of these things and put them in her basket and carried them home, and then she had died before she could eat them.
This was the part nobody told you about grief. Not the loss itself — she had been prepared for the loss, or had thought she had — but the persistence of objects. The fact that the world did not reorganize itself around an absence. That things simply remained.
She took the fruit bowl and put it on the kitchen table. She would deal with it later. She would deal with all of it later. Right now she just wanted to walk through the rooms and let them be what they were: a record of someone's life, organized by habit and preference and the ten thousand small decisions that a person makes without knowing they are making them.
Her mother's reading glasses were on the arm of the chair by the window. A bookmark — a receipt from the supermarket, which struck her as very much her mother — was tucked into a library book on the side table. Page 247. She would never find out what happened on page 248.
She sat down in the chair. She put on her mother's reading glasses, which were the wrong prescription and made the room swim slightly, and she looked out the window at the garden, which was beginning to go to seed in the particular way that gardens do when the person who tends them is no longer there.
She sat there for a long time. The light moved across the floor. Eventually she took the glasses off and set them back on the arm of the chair, exactly where she had found them, and she did not know why she did this except that it seemed important not to disturb things. Not yet. Not today.