Part 21
Part 21 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
We were going to move him on Saturday the seventeenth.
Tom took the door off the room over the garage and rehung it so it opened the other way, because the original swing put you into the room before you could knock, and he did that without being asked and without telling me why, and I stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched him do it and did not say anything either.
I told Danny on the Thursday. He took it the way he took everything, which is to say he asked four practical questions and did not say how he felt about any of it.
“Is there a lock on the inside.”
“Yes.”
“Do I have to eat downstairs.”
“Only if you want to.”
“What did you tell the kid.”
“Nothing yet. We were going to do it together.”
He thought about that one for a while.
“Okay,” he said.
Friday the sixteenth I worked a half day and bought sheets, and a lamp, and a small refrigerator off a man in Huber Heights for forty dollars, and a card table because he liked one and I was not going to make him give that up, and I put all of it in the room over the garage and stood in the doorway feeling like a person who had done something.
Saturday morning I got to Brandt at nine with the van Tom borrowed from his brother.
The door of 3B was unlocked.
I knew before I was all the way in. You know. The air in a room with a person in it is a different air.
Everything was there. That is what I want you to understand, because it is what I could not make the police understand for two hours. The bed was made with the corners done. The seven shirts were on their hangers. The forty paperbacks were on the shelf, including all eleven copies. The cards were squared with the rubber band around them on the card table, next to the two mugs, squared to the edge. The windmill cookies were in the cabinet, one package open and folded shut the way he did it. The coffee can with the cleaning money in it was on the counter with two hundred and ten dollars in it.
His coat was on the hook.
It was eleven degrees outside on the sixteenth of January and my brother’s coat was on the hook.
I went through the whole place twice, and the second time I opened the second drawer of the dresser, under the undershirts, where I had never once let on that I had looked.
The photograph was gone.