W Is for Wasted

had made of it.
    By the time I’d loaded the car, the trunk was full, the passenger seat was impassable, and the backseat was stacked two boxes high and four across. There wasn’t much room back there to begin with and now the view out the rear window was largely blocked.
    I slipped the wedding photo into my shoulder bag and then drove to Pete and Ruthie’s house. I pulled around to the alleyway that ran behind the property. I could have parked in front and let the engine idle while I knocked on her door and explained what I was up to, but I wasn’t
taking
Pete’s possessions, I was returning them. Since he stored his boxes in the garage, I figured I should unload them there and talk to her afterward.
    Pete’s Ford Fairlane was no longer parked by the shrubs. I surmised, correctly as it turned out, that the new owner had put in an appearance and had made off with his new vehicle, such as it was. He’d left Pete’s gun-cleaning kit and the bag of birdseed in the alley, along with a bulging plastic bag that I was guessing contained the contents of the two map pockets and the glove compartment. I toted the items as far as the side door to the garage and left them there while I moved boxes into the already overcrowded space. When I’d finished, I grabbed the kit, the birdseed, and the bag of odds and ends, and knocked on the back door.
    Ruthie appeared in an old-fashioned floor-length peignoir, a filmy pale blue with pin-tucking down the bodice and a matching nightgown under it. For the first time in all the years I’d known Pete, it dawned on me he had a sex life. The notion was so embarrassing, I averted my gaze. Ruthie’s hair was plaited in a long gray-and-blond braid that lay over her left shoulder. It was 9:30 by then and I’d assumed she was the sort who’d be up at the crack of dawn and ready to start her day.
    When she opened the door, she said, “Oh, it’s you. I couldn’t imagine who was knocking at my back door. If I’d known you were coming, I’d have put on some clothes. I have the day off, so I was having a lazy morning.”
    “I was just dropping off the boxes we picked up from Pete’s landlady. I left everything in the garage.”
    I held up the kit and the two bags. “His car’s gone. Looks like the guy who bought it cleared out the trunk, the map pockets, and the glove compartment.”
    Ruthie relieved me of the items and put them on the kitchen counter. “Come in and have a cup of coffee. I could use the company.”
    “I’d like that, thanks.”
    I followed her into the kitchen. During the earlier visit, the front rooms had been tidy and I suspected the disorder here had accrued as a function of too much stuff and no clear sense of what to do with it. My guess was that for a short time after Pete’s death, she’d worked with efficiency, thinking if she kept everything shipshape, she’d stay on top of the process. Little by little, though, she’d lost control. In her shoes, I’d have called the junk man and had him haul everything away, but something of Pete’s obsession with storage cartons must have been contagious. Truly, there was no way to know what he might have hidden away. Pack rats by nature are attached to the objects they accumulate—old newspapers, tires, vintage soda bottles, bobbleheads, canned goods, shot glasses, baseball caps. Pete had an issue with cardboard boxes, which he’d apparently found irresistible. I’m sometimes reluctant to toss one myself, especially if it’s in pristine condition. What if you have to ship something? What would you pack it in?
    As soon as we settled at the kitchen table with our coffee cups, I leaned down and removed the wedding clipping from my shoulder bag and passed it across the table. “I thought you might like to have this.”
    She took the picture and studied it, smiling to herself. “Nineteen forty-nine. It seems like yesterday and then I’m reminded how young we were. I swear that dress felt very stylish at the time.”
    “How’d you meet him?”
    “I’d just completed my AA degree at City College and I was waiting to get into nursing school. I was working at the front desk at a walk-in clinic. He came in to pick up a prescription for an antibiotic in advance of some dental work. We chatted and when I got off work, he was waiting in the parking lot. He asked if I wanted to have coffee and I said sure.”
    “And that was that,” I said.
    “More or less. I was smitten with him from the first. He was sweet