Free Want Not by Jonathan Miles

espresso maker; a citrus zester; a stainless-steel cocktail shaker onto which was etched MARKETBOLT ANNUAL MEETING, THE SCOTTSDALE PRINCESS, SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ., AUGUST 10–14, 2001 ; a pigtail-corded handheld blender; some individual tart pans; an analog meat thermometer; and a white apron, never worn (never even unfolded from the crisp square it came packaged in), emblazoned with the title WORLD’S BEST MOM . Nothing she needed.
    She fingered the apron for a moment, its virginate starchiness, its embroidered sentiment. She didn’t recall Alexis giving her this—oh, maybe vaguely—and almost snorted at the thought of Alexis giving it to her now: at the impossibility of it, that is. Alexis would probably just bookmark the title with asterisks, the way she noted sarcasm in her text messages: * WORLD’S BEST MOM*. WHATEVER . Alexis was at that age, seventeen, when mothers come into view as tyrants or imbeciles or both. Sara wasn’t sure which category she fell into, nor did she much care; she’d been seventeen once, too, and knew these phases passed. Not that she wouldn’t mind this one passing quicker. Just last night she and Alexis had had it out over college applications, over Alexis’s mulish determination to attend Richard Varick College in the city, which was where her father had gone—along with every other Long Island meathead who wanted to break into Wall Street. Varick was okay, she supposed, but just barely—mid-tier, and wholly devoid of cachet. The great sin of parenting, Sara felt, was letting your children aim too low. Allow them to settle, and that’s just what they’d do. Loose expectations were like junk food; kids just gorged themselves. She replaced the apron in the box and moved on.
    What caught her eye, on the next box that she lifted, was the handwriting. It wasn’t hers. BRIAN , it read, in unfamiliar blue cursive, and for a moment she failed to make sense of it. But then of course, she remembered. Her sister Liz had packaged up all of Brian’s stuff for her. “I don’t want to see it,” Sara had told her, “I don’t want to have it, I don’t want it near me.” But Alexis might, Liz had said, adding gently, “someday.” It was Liz, in fact, who’d rented this unit for her, who’d done the initial piling which Sara, over the years, had occasionally supplemented with boxed-up obsoletisms (like the zester, displaced by her microplane, or the analog meat thermometer, displaced by a digital model, etc.) and various other non- or no-longer-essentials. With a small huff, Sara transferred the box leftward, in order to keep digging for the roasting pan, then paused. That was seven years ago . . . seven years and two months. And now she had Dave: the completion of her circle, the satisfying epilogue: the closure everyone had urged her to seek. She stared at the box, wondering how many like it were stacked here, and what they might contain, and bit her bottom lip again. Something irresistible, in an electromagnetic sense, drew her nearer to the box—some archaeological allure, like uncovering a time capsule while digging in the garden. But this was
her
time capsule—
her
archaeological record—
her
life, or at least some broken shards of it, dumped into all these cardboard squares. What harm could there be, at this post-closure point? Sighing, she sat down on the KITCHEN box, its top slightly crumpling beneath her weight, and after sliding some other boxes away with her feet, to clear some room, she opened the box marked BRIAN .
    His face was the first thing she saw: impossibly square-jawed, with those hard Clint Eastwood eyes above that slanted overcocky grin, a dimpled half-Windsor knot at the base of that thick, not-quite-loutish neck. He was staring up at her, in grayscale, from a cut-out piece of newsprint more yellowed and crispy than she’d expected it to be: his obituary, if that’s what you called it, from the “Portraits in Grief” series that the
New York
Times
ran after