Times would help — but then my friend Marion down the block said they might make the paper crumble faster. But it was like walking into a sawdust mill, every time I opened the drawers and so many little pieces had fallen away. I’d also heard that roaches and mice love the ink and glue in paper—’ ‘What glue? These were all typewritten or photocopied pages.’ ‘That waxy coat you had on what you said was erasable paper. If these pests like glue, I was sure they’d like that or would smell it, and you know I’m scared to death of those things.’ ‘If you were really afraid you could have put them in an airtight trunk.’ ‘Where do I have one?’ ‘You could have told me, about the whole thing and your mothball flakes, and I would have phoned a luggage store around here and had them deliver one to you. It would have been a little extra work for you, transferring it all to a trunk, but probably no more so than sticking them in the garbage cans outside. But I also would have paid some worker — the woman who comes to clean for you once a week — to do it and to bring the trunk down to the basement, or the super for that. Because those things — the unpublished stuff — were practically priceless to me.’ ‘Then you should have taken them with you if they were so much to you that way and in the very trunk you say you would have bought for me.’ ‘I told you when I left. I couldn’t be shlepping them from city to city like that. I thought they had a safe place here till I got back. I also wanted to be away from them for a while, thinking — who knows? — that some new idea might come to me about them if they weren’t by my side. That’s how it works sometimes.’ ‘Well I’m sorry. Doubly so for thinking I could do something good for someone by letting him keep his things here. But people think my place, because of the basement and that I have so many spare bedrooms now, can be a warehouse for them, but OK. I’m also sorry, for when the pages were discomposing to nothing, to think I was doing the right thing by getting rid of them. But my worst fears — roaches and mice, and even rats, possibly, though we’ve never had one in the house but I have seen one on the street — got the best of me. There’s nothing I can do about it now but grieve along with you. But just for my sake, since this is beginning to kill me too, think if all you said was so valuable to you, really is.’ Books. She once gave half the books he had in his old bedroom to Salvation Army or some organization like that. ‘They knocked on the door. I have a bell that works, but they knocked. They were very polite, though, when they told me what they wanted my old books and furniture for. The poor, handicapped, and so forth. I was affected by it, thought I could do some good for them and also clean out my place a little, which I’m always promising myself to do but never really get around to it. So I gave them a couple of broken chairs and an old card table and lots of odds and ends in the basement and then some of the books in the bookcases in the boys’ room that looked the oldest and also in the credenza in the back hallway.’ ‘My books