Aunt Betty’s pearls. Her gold watch. The deed. My diplomas. My passport. The box of letters she wrote me during pharmacy school when she knew I was lonely. Three framed photographs: Betty at the beach in a sunhat, Betty in the kitchen flour up to her elbows, Betty holding my chin on the courthouse steps after she won the will contest and saying, softly but with steel, “Now let them learn what no looks like.”
The rest I treated as material.
Brett’s suits from the hall closet went into garment bags I listed online for cheap. His golf clubs. The watch collection he always pretended was investment-grade. The monogrammed weekender bag. The espresso machine he insisted we “needed” though I was the only one who cleaned it. People came by the back gate with cash and carried his vanity out in pieces. I did not feel petty. I felt efficient.
The guest-room mattress was harder. It was the one from my parents’ house that I had taken after Betty died because she bought a better one for the room and said there was no sense wasting it. Looking at it now, knowing those pictures had been taken on sheets spread over that exact rectangle, made my skin crawl. I called a junk hauler.