Housecleaning

      Nan Vogelsang spent evenings and weekends cleaning up what he left behind.

He left on a Tuesday and never looked back, let the attorneys handle it. Of course, they never visited the dim half-finished basement to cart out the board-ends and old lumber, glue gone bad in the tube, carpet squares, wire nuts, a rake without a handle, loose Allen wrenches, a hacksaw with the blade worked beyond its usefulness. None of this was mentioned in the legal documents.

Or the nails bent in driving them, thrown back in the blue cardboard boxes along with the good ones. Pounds of nails, spikes and finishing nails, roofing nails and decking nails. More than anything else, nails.

And the sandpaper discs, clotted with blackened shellac. An old picture frame, come apart at opposite corners into two right angles. A pair of shears, rusted. Washers. Stove bolts. A can opener with grease on the handle. The start of a butcher-block table top, the edges raw and top unfinished. Sockets loose from their set. A gallon of neat's-foot oil. PVC joints. Brick-colored rags tossed under the work bench. A square of plexiglass. WD-40. The kitchen wall clock that buzzed and stuck. A broken kite. A wall calendar from the gas station. A Phillips-head screwdriver with a broken tip, used for mixing and prying, the end gobbed with tar. Flux and a roll of solder and the torch but no propane. Paint sticks. Sawdust pushed aside by his hand.

He was gone gone gone. To another life, like a cicada coming up out of the ground after nine years. That was how he’d explained things to a friend, who by way of other friends brought the story back around to her.

He was flown, she thought, or crawled away, but the discarded shell remained. And it was supposed to be seventeen years.

She couldn’t see how the marriage had been cut off so abruptly; neither could she project ahead the time they might have spent together. The years fell away to both sides. All she could see, if things had not changed, for more years, or ever, was that eventually they would have been swamped with the accumulation of George’s things. And maybe that’s why he left, she thought as she filled another box. Rusted trowel. Wood putty. One glove with the thumb broken through. He wasn’t able to deal with the complexity of the accumulated and undiscarded.

She thought it was his upbringing, his parents country people who got factory jobs but continued to live on acreage they rented to people who milked cattle and grew corn. You didn’t throw things away that might be used for propping or filling, holding or patching. It was a useful trait among farm people, like those whose rotting fences had been cut across by the lot lines in this subdivision. In the suburbs a habit of saving things was like an appendix, or tonsils, without purpose, only problematic.

A round red reflector disc, the glue on the back gone brittle. A chunk of two-by-four. Electrical tape. Handles from an old filing cabinet.

Nan had never intruded on his shop. She knew how he worked, everything strung out across the workbench, and anything picked up or moved could set a project back for hours, or forever. The sheer number of things here had put her off for months, while she’d soldiered through the financial shifts and legal matters. She donated sporting goods to the Scouts, tools to the sheltered workshop. She’d carted his abandoned clothes to the Goodwill, lowering the bags into the drop-off bin and then racing home, hoping people in the shopping center believed her to be a young widow...