Free The Program by Gregg Hurwitz Page A

house was dead quiet. If it weren't for her Blazer in the driveway, he might have thought she'd decided to clock a P.M. after her morning shift.
    He called, and she answered from down the hall. She was sitting on the floor of Ginny's old room, back against the wall. Same flowered wallpaper, same Pocahontas night-light. In the middle of the room sat a heavy-duty garbage bag, stuffed with diminutive clothes from the closet. Hangers scattered the floor.
    Dray's face was blank, her forehead unlined -- the impassivity of shock relived. "Sorry I didn't wait for you. I know you've been ready" -- she gestured to the empty closet -- "for a while now. I just wanted to...I guess with my reaction last night at the door, it made me realize...maybe it's time to move through it, like you've been saying."
    He bobbed his head.
    She blew a wisp of hair off her forehead. "It's so damn exhausting. It shouldn't be, this stuff, but it is." She extended an arm, and he pulled her to her feet. They kissed, Dray wrapping her arms around the back of his neck. She hadn't been as demonstrative or as emotional before Ginny's death, though Tim didn't mind the change a bit.
    She moved to the bed and began pulling off the sheets -- Powerpuff Girls flannels that had been dutifully washed weekly for over a year. Ginny's motifs were relics in the fast-paced world of children's trends. They'd grown outdated and unhip, an ignominy Ginny would never have permitted. Tim had learned, step by step, how to live again without a daughter, but he still missed toy stores and zany cartoons and Olivia the naughty pig. There was a time he could distinguish Beauty and the Beast songs from those from The Little Mermaid. He thought of Bederman's diatribe about the Christmastime ploys of toy companies and realized he would do anything to be conned into buying the latest and greatest girl's novelty right about now.
    He started to help, emptying the desk drawers into a fresh bag, careful to handle Ginny's former belongings with care. When he realized he was treating a SpongeBob pencil eraser with reverence, he let go and started scooping and dumping. Dray's voice pulled him from his thoughts. "I don't even know if this makes me sad. Or guilty." She held a tiny T-shirt in each hand; they drooped like dead kittens. "We see so much of this shit, this heavy symbolic shit, in movies, on TV, but maybe this isn't the time and place for it." Her voice was flat like her eyes. "Maybe we should try not to think and just get this done."
    At the end of the hour, Ginny's possessions -- the sum total of her physical grasp on the world -- were bound up in seven Hefty bags bound for the Salvation Army. Tim hauled them to the porch, then took apart her bed and her desk -- doing his best not to let the crayon marks, the Kool-Aid stains, the glittery Dora stickers reduce him to uselessness. Once the furniture also made its way outside, he came back in, sweaty and hot in the face. Dray was standing in the entry, looking out at the sad assembly of goods on the front walk, a broken-down convoy.
    Dray said, "I think I'm going to cry now."
    Tim started to say okay but caught her as her knees buckled. He held her, stroked her hair. He pressed his face to her head, rocking her on the floor, her legs kicking and sprawling. He worked to control his own reaction, because the unspoken deal they'd arrived at through trial and error was that they'd only let go like this one at a time.
    The crying stopped, then the tight sobs accompanying her inhalations. Her hair, normally razor straight and straw-colored, stayed pasted to her sticky face in brown swirls. Her eyes -- honest and strong and magnificently green, as always. She coughed out a brief, exhausted laugh. "Guess I figured out what to feel, huh? Hell."
    "Let me take you out. How about Nobu?"
    "Nobu?"
    "What the hell, I'm making the federal bucks now."
    They'd been only once to the upscale Japanese restaurant, located over the canyon from their Moorpark house.