Linda came Tuesday morning.
She walked through the rooms with a clipboard, speaking gently because good agents can tell when a house is not just a house.
When she finished, she gave me a number.
“That is the number I want,” I told her.
“It might take two or three months in this market,” she said.
“If it takes longer than thirty days,” I told her, “I will reduce the price until it moves.”
She looked at me carefully.
“Are you sure about this?”
I stood in the living room where Carol used to read on Sunday afternoons, where the grandchildren had once built forts out of couch cushions back when they were small enough to fit under them.
“I have been sure about very few things in my life,” I said. “I am sure about this.”
I did not tell Dennis.
I did not post anything online. I hardly had any online presence to speak of, which may have been a personal failing in some years, but in this case was clearly an advantage.
I packed what I wanted.
I donated what I did not.
Carol’s jewelry, her pearl necklace, her engagement ring, two sets of earrings she wore regularly, I wrapped carefully in tissue paper and placed in a small wooden box. That box went with my own things.
They were not furniture.
They were not house contents.
They were hers.
Therefore, they were mine to carry.
Not available for distribution.
I closed every bank account at the old branch and opened new ones at a different institution. I did not forward my mail. I left no forwarding address.
On April fourteenth, exactly ten years and three days after Carol died, I loaded the last boxes into the back of my truck.
Then I drove out of the Broad Ripple neighborhood of Indianapolis for the last time.
I did not look back.
Not because I was angry.
Because there was nothing behind me that required a second look.
I had a destination.
I had a plan.
I had Carol’s jewelry box on the passenger seat and eleven hundred miles of road ahead of me.
That was enough.
Bend, Oregon, is not a place most people in Indianapolis think about much.
It sits in the high desert of central Oregon, east of the Cascade Mountains. The winters are cold, dry, and bright, not gray and damp like Indiana. The Deschutes River runs through the city. On clear days, the mountains appear from almost anywhere in town. The Three Sisters. Broken Top. Mount Bachelor.
And clear days in Bend are more rule than exception.
Carol and I had driven through Bend once in 2009 on a road trip for our thirtieth anniversary. We had stopped for coffee and ended up walking by the river longer than planned. Carol had looked out the car window at the mountains and the high desert light and said, “If I were starting over somewhere, it would be here.”
She had not been starting over.
She had been passing through.
But I had filed the remark away the way I file things that matter.
Ten years later, sitting alone at a dining room table with seven place settings and no guests, I remembered it.
I arrived in Bend on a Thursday afternoon in April.