Fed up

Do I throw out anything that reminds me of her? Do I keep the house set up as though she were still here? No one gives you an instruction manual that tells you what to do when your wife dies. But this feels right.”
    “Do you suppose that I could come by tomorrow morning?” I tried to suppress my excitement at the prospect of getting to peek around his house.
    “Sure. How about nine o’clock?” Then he asked the last question you’d expect to hear from a grieving widower: “Uh, by the way, not that it matters, but do you know if these donations are tax deductible?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Yes, they are.”
     

 
    I drove to Leo’s house on Tuesday morning, my energy fueled by two large cups of coffee and a zest for snooping. This time, I parked in his driveway and checked out the yard: an overgrown privet hedge thick with maple saplings, a few rhododendrons and azaleas, a couple of peonies clinging to life, and—damn!—nothing even remotely like foxglove. If there’d been foxglove here, the police would have found it by now, wouldn’t they? Yes, almost certainly.
    I opened the trunk of the car and grabbed a cardboard box and the garbage bags I’d brought for Francie’s clothing. Feeling superstitious, I avoided the front door, the one through which Francie’s body had been carried, and went to the back door. I rang the bell and waited several minutes for Leo to answer.
    “Chloe. Hi. Excuse my shirt. It never occurred to me to learn how to do laundry. Isn’t that stupid?” Leo looked dreadful. His eyes were puffy, his hair unruly. His shirt was not only dirty but buttoned wrong. Had he relied on his wife to align buttons and buttonholes? Once I’d entered the kitchen, it was clear that laundry was far from the only kind of housework left undone. Every surface of the kitchen was piled with dirty dishes, empty and half-empty take-out containers, newspapers, junk mail, and tons of other debris, including four grocery bags that hadn’t been unpacked and, scattered all over the floor, what must have been at least two pounds of coffee beans. Leo waved his arm around. “Sorry about this. I had no idea how much Francie did around the house.”
    “Really, it’s no problem. I don’t know what to say after what you’ve been through. I’m glad I can do something,” I said in my best social worker voice. “Why don’t you show me where Francie’s closet is, okay?”
    “Sure. It’s up here,” he said as he started for the stairs. “But I’ve got to warn you. Avoid the bathroom where, uh, where Francie, you know...” Leo stammered. “The police spent hours up there, but they didn’t... It hasn’t been cleaned. Can you believe that? It’s their job to find out what happened to my wife, and they leave that filth in there for me?”
    As if it were a police job to scrub the bathroom for him! Leo might reasonably want to avoid sanitizing the area himself, but couldn’t he have hired a cleaning service? Or some sort of company that specialized in hazardous waste? It was obscene that the mess had been sitting there for over a week now. Was Leo just going to seal off the bathroom forever? I tried to remember the exact words I’d used in offering Leo my help. I prayed that I hadn’t been foolish enough to tell him that I’d do absolutely anything. As we passed through the dining room and the front hall, I noticed yet more litter as well as the need for dusting and vaccuming. The mess seriously detracted from what was otherwise a beautiful house. The multitude of large and brightly colored art pieces on the walls were so cheery that I momentarily forgot this was the scene of the crime.
    “Leo,” I said speedily, “there are companies that can be hired to clean anything. I can help you find one, if you like.”
    “Really? That would be wonderful. I just haven’t known what to... Here you go.” We entered the master bedroom. “Thank God there’s another bathroom off the master suite. That’s Francie’s closet.” Leo pointed to an oversized walk-in closet with sliding doors that were partly open. “Please, take anything you think these women could use. Francie has enough clothes to outfit a hundred homeless women. I’ll be back in a minute.” Leo left the room.
    Because of the condition of the rest of the house, I was surprised to find the bedroom tidy. Amazingly, the bed had been made, and Leo had taken care to arrange the bright blue bedding and pillows to resemble a guest room at a