They won’t find any dishes or utensils or pots or pans or anything like that in the kitchen sink or dish rack. He washed the little there was last night and put them away. The paper bag of paper, plastic, metal and glass for the single-stream recycling pickup this Friday will be next to the trash can in the kitchen. On top of the dryer will be the book he was reading last night in the living room easy chair and which he put there by the door so he wouldn’t forget to take it with him to the Y the next day. They’ll find in the refrigerator an aluminum pie pan, covered with aluminum foil, the dinner he would have had tonight. He’d cooked two chicken breasts and some root vegetables together in the oven last night. Then, standing beside the stove and without cutting up the chicken breasts but waiting till they were no longer hot, he ate with his fingers about half of what was in the pan. The dinner was so good, and he was also a bit tired of cooking something different almost every night, that instead of freezing what was left in the pan, he’d have the same dinner tonight. They’ll re-cover the pan with the same foil they found on it and throw all of it out too.
Dining room will be tidy, everything — chairs under the table, place mat, napkin, eating utensils — in its place. He rearranged the fruit in the fruit bowl the day before so it’d look neat and nice. Living room will also be tidy, except for an empty juice glass on the end table next to the easy chair, which he drank two glasses of red wine out of while he was reading the previous night. The empty wine bottle will be on top of the recycling bag. They’ll think it was so unlike him to leave a dirty glass on a table overnight, and he must have forgot to bring it into the kitchen to wash it. They’ll figure out, if not this week then the next, which day the garbage gets picked up and which day all the recyclable stuff, and also to put the trash cans and things on the street early that morning or the night before. They’ll bring the juice glass to the kitchen and probably have to soak it awhile in soapy water to get the dried residue off the bottom of it. There’s no scrub brush in the house to get in that glass, and a sponge with detergent on it never got rid of all the residue.
Their beds haven’t been touched, other than for the cat taking morning and afternoon naps on them, since the cleaning woman cleaned their rooms and straightened their covers and pillows the last time she was here.
They’ll have some work to do in his bedroom. He made his bed after he got up. They’ll strip it and wash the linens with the two towels and washcloth from his bathroom, and in another wash the patchwork quilt Abby and he had a woman in Maine make for them about thirty years ago. They’ll throw out his personal items in the medicine cabinet above the sink: comb, hairbrush, toothbrush, nailbrush, shaving soap, and maybe his shaving brush and razor and package of razor blades. Or maybe they’ll include the shaving brush with the other things of his — clothes, shoes, slippers, his one tie, and so on. . coats, sport jacket, belts, his one dress shirt, which he ordered from L.L. Bean several years ago and never took out of the plastic bag it came in — they’ll give to organizations like Goodwill and Purple Heart. What also might go will be what remains of their mother’s skirts and shirts in his bedroom closet and which they told him a number of times they didn’t want. They never took any of her clothes other than two mufflers, and those only when it was very cold outside and they needed something warm around their necks, and some head scarves he never saw them wear and two knitted wool caps she brought back from the Soviet Union before he met her. For the last three years he’s been gradually giving her clothes to the same organizations. There are two empty drawers in their dresser that were once filled with her belongings. His old terrycloth bathrobe, hanging on a hook on his bathroom door, is too ragged to give away, so they’ll dump it. They’ll also probably throw out the shopping bags of tax receipts of the three previous years that are in his bedroom closet and seemed to spill over to the floor every time the cat got in there. They’ll probably keep, once they see what year it’s for, or at least till they speak to his tax accountant, the bag of receipts for this year. They’ll also give to Goodwill or Purple Heart the two ten-pound weights on his night table that he exercised with most mornings, and the two fifteen-pound weights they’re resting on, which he stopped exercising with a year ago when he bought the ten-pound weights.
What to do with his writings, though? And his typewriters, two spare ones on a shelf in the guest closet, and the remaindered copies of his books in cartons in the basement, and all his writing supplies? Between them, they’ll keep a few copies of each of his remaindered books and give away the rest. Maybe his former department will want some to give to its students, or the Baltimore County library system might be able to use them. They won’t know what to do with his old manuscripts of published works they’ll find in the file cabinet under his work table and the newer unpublished manuscripts and photocopies of them on the bookcase in his bedroom, and will have to ask his writer friends and former colleagues. Maybe the school library’s special collections department will take both the old and new manuscripts along with whatever notebooks and letters and such they find of his and a copy of each of his books. As for his writing supplies — one of them will keep the unopened ream of paper for her copier. The other stuff — typewriter ribbons, correction film, binder clips, lots of cheap pens and two staplers and a box of staples and so on — they’ll probably stash in the bags for Goodwill and Purple Heart, hoping some of it can be used. The typewriters, if no writer they speak to wants them or knows anyone who does and none of their friends want them either, they’ll give away to one of those organizations. And all those photographs. Boxes of photographs, albums of photographs, drawers of photographs. He kept them without ever taking them out and looking at them, except for the memorial album his daughters made of their mother, but they’ll know what to do with them.
On his writing table is the typewriter he worked on the last few years. Never broke down. “Never gave me trouble,” he used to say. “I have spares that I’ll probably never use.” To its immediate right on the table is the first draft of the story he was working on. To its immediate left is the pile of scrap paper he took from to work on the same page of the story over and over again till he was satisfied with it and was ready to switch to the clean final-copy paper. And to the immediate right of the first draft of the story is the stack of clean paper. Behind the typewriter is the part of the story he completed — fourteen pages held together by a binder clip. All the stacks will be neat. He made them that way yesterday after he finished writing for the day and fitted the dust cover over the typewriter. It was getting dark out and the two lamps on either side of the typewriter, each with warnings on the inside of the shade not to use more than a 60-watt bulb, don’t give enough light to write when it gets that dark. Besides, he was tired after writing for a total of about eight hours that day. The story in progress, the completed part and the first draft, will also probably go to the special collections department if it’ll take it with his other manuscripts. The dictionary and thesaurus he kept on the table to the left of the scrap paper pile are in too bad a shape — lots of dog-eared pages, especially at the front of the books, and covers separating from the spines — to give to Goodwill or some other place or keep themselves. So they might put the books in their own shopping bag, because they’ll be so heavy — maybe even double up the bag before they put the books in — and put it out with the rest of the recycled paper or throw out with the trash.