Free The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart Page A

of the value of the ballpoint pen on Oliver’s bedside table, his favorite pen, without which he wouldn’t write a check or even sign his name? To her, that pen would look ordinary, would look like trash. The longer I stood in paralyzed indecision, the more likely Ruth was to be ripping through Oliver’s bedroom like a natural disaster, turning all his treasures into debris.
    I expected to find Ruth flinging the closets and dresser drawers open, grabbing clothes and books by the armload. But she was standing stock-still in the center of Oliver’s bedroom, the cardboard box on her hip. When she turned to me there were tears in her eyes. “The sheets are still rumpled,” she said.
    I made a quick survey of the room, letting my eyes skip over the bed. There were three dressers topped with bookcases. There were two closets, an armoire, two wooden chests, and two bedside tables, each with a drawer. That was just the bedroom. There was also the bathroom, with its shelves, cabinet, and medicine chest, and then there was all the built-in storage in the den. “Okay,” I said briskly. I clapped my hands at Ruth like a coach. “Let’s do the big job first.” I pointed at the wall of dressers.
    Ruth stared at me. “I changed my mind. I can’t do it.”
    “Yes, you can. Come on, let’s go.”
    She set down her box, and we turned toward the dressers. We each opened a drawer, and sighed in unison at the chaos revealed.
    It’s astonishing what a single life accumulates. The belts, lightbulbs, AAA batteries, bud vases, safety pins, expired medications, eyeglasses, rubber bands, picture frames, birth announcements, buttons from old coats, boxes that once held jewelry—all the things we think we just might need someday. These things we endow with a certain life—the possibility that we might use them, the memory we attach to them—and then, when we die, they become just things again. Again and again Ruth and I turned to each other, holding up a broken travel alarm or a never-used date planner from 1979, and said, “What on earth was he saving this for?” More than once one of us held up an unidentifiable object—a black plastic rectangle, a twisted piece of metal—and said, “What the hell is this?”
    After three hours we had emptied the dresser drawers. Ruth shut the last one with an air of weary victory, and then reconsidered. She reopened each one and ran her hand all the way to the back.
    “I think we got it all,” I said, but she kept looking. As each drawer came up empty, she seemed to grow more certain that there was something still to find. In the last drawer she checked, she found a small gray jewelry box, printed with the name of the jeweler in gold.
    “Another one?” I said. “He really loved those empty jewelry boxes.”
    Ruth shook it. “There’s something inside.” She made an excited face—a pirate about to open the treasure chest—and then she took off the lid. In a tone of wonder, she said, “I thought these were lost.” She showed me two slender gold bands—her parents’ wedding rings.
    After that, Ruth didn’t want to clean anymore. She sat on the floor and turned the rings over and over in her hands, reading the inscriptions inside. I was glad she had found something that meant so much to her, but I couldn’t conquer the envy I felt at the emotion in her voice. I wanted to find something, too. On my own I lost the focus that had gotten us through the first task. I wandered from closet to dresser and back again, opening and closing drawers.
    At Oliver’s bedside table, I picked up his favorite pen. “Can I keep this?”
    “What?” Ruth looked puzzled. “Of course.”
    I slipped the pen into my pocket. Then I bent to open the drawer, and found my reward. There it was—the exact thing I had been hoping to find, without quite knowing it—an envelope with my name on it atop a package wrapped in thick brown paper. I lifted it out with reverence, and felt immediately possessive, like