They Left Us Everything by Plum Johnson Read Free Book Online

thing everybody’s born knowing how to do.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Everybody’s born knowing how to die.”

    I awake before Jessica and carry Sambo downstairs. I try to clear a place on the kitchen table for breakfast, but Mum’s clutter is everywhere. I replace her plastic daffodils with a glass bowl of mandarin oranges. With the dryness of the furnace, the mandarins will petrify after several weeks and stay hard and colourful for a long time. Dad always refused to add a humidifier. Instead, he placed pans of water on the floor beside every hot air vent, which only hydrated the dogs. We used to joke that the reason Mum and Dad looked so young was that the dryness had mummified them, but since Dad rarely turned up the furnace, it’s also possible they were simply freeze-dried in the permafrost.
    As I pop bread into the new toaster, I can hear Jessica stirring upstairs. I’ll soon be driving her to the train. When she comes downstairs, I can tell she’s been crying—her eyes are rimmed red. All three of my children had a unique bond with Mum: Virginia as the first grandchild she doted on; Carter through his shared love of politics and history; and Jessica through a mutual understanding. She seemed to bring out the best in Mum—perhaps the extra generation gave them space to breathe. Dad said they were “simpatico.” Jessica was deeply affected by Mum’s death, and small things can suddenly trigger her grief. This morning she’s been ambushed by a photograph: Mum’s head is tilted into Jessica’s neck and thetwo of them are laughing with their arms around each other. I’d moved the picture onto the hall table, where she didn’t expect to see it.
    “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” I say, and I fold her to me.
    “It’s okay,” she says. “I just really miss her.”
    I look up at the windows. Every frame drips with icicles that thaw and freeze and thaw again in our wild, unpredictable winter. Sometimes they all melt away to nothing. Then, forty-eight hours later, the icicles are so long it feels like I’m imprisoned behind bars.
    When I get back from the train station, I go upstairs to make the bed. I empty the hot water bottles into the sink and remember that Dad used to turn the furnace off at night. When we awoke, icicles had formed not only on the outside of the windows but on the inside, too. We slept in woollen socks, hats, sweaters, and nose cozies—my own invention that I started to knit as soon as I was old enough to hold knitting needles. They were cone-shaped affairs that covered our noses and had loops to hook over our ears. Dad supplemented with hot water bottles, but he’d pour in only a tablespoon of boiling water, and so they’d lie flat and floppy on our bellies. “Waste not, want not!” Dad would say. Then he’d climb into bed beside Mum, who he claimed was the best kind of furnace there was.
    I pass by the open doors to all the bedrooms and reality finally hits. How am I ever going to untangle this mess? How am I ever going to separate the trash from the treasure in the overstuffed contents accumulated during Mum and Dad’s combined lifetimes of more than 180 years? Some of the valuable items I know none of us will want, while junk of no apparent value has such memory-laden significance that we’ll have to draw straws to see who gets it. All the grandchildrentell me they want the plastic sign of the gun on the mudroom window. I wonder where the nose cozies are?
    I stomp down the wooden stairs to the basement with my load of dirty towels, keeping my head down low so my hair won’t brush up against any spider webs lurking in the ceiling. Light filters in through the laundry-room windows behind pots of wispy dried geranium plants, casting splinters of cold morning sun on the concrete floor. A cat’s cradle of empty clothesline zigzags across the room. The ironing board sits forlornly in the corner, an old flannelette cover clipped over it with wooden clothes pegs.
    Then I look