I needed it to be true, so I let myself believe it.

The funeral was on a Thursday. By Friday morning, my brother Russell had decided the house needed to be emptied in two days.

Russell is four years older than me and has lived in Memphis for the past twenty years with a succession of trucks, a bad back that has gotten more narrative in the telling over the decades, and the patience of a wasp in August. He is not a bad man. I want to say that plainly because what follows might make it seem like I think he is, and it is more complicated than that. He is a man who learned early that moving fast was a way of not having to feel things, and he has been moving fast since our father died and has not seen any compelling reason to stop.

He had a camper payment, he said. He had to get back. Two days.

Wayne, our stepfather, had been out of the picture for six years by then, which is a polite way of saying that Mama had asked him to leave after something she never fully explained to either of us, and he had left, and they had not divorced because Mama did not believe in it, and he had died three years after leaving, quietly and without complication, in an assisted living facility in Dothan, Alabama, which was where he was from originally and where he had gone when there was nowhere else to go.

So it was Russell and me sorting through seventy-eight years of a woman’s life.

I took the pantry because nobody else wanted it. Russell was in the living room wrapping the television remote in newspaper, which he would later pack into a box labeled LIVING ROOM and carry to his truck along with Mama’s recliner and the framed photograph of our father that had hung by the front door for as long as I could remember. I did not argue about the photograph. Russell had known our father four years longer than I had, and four years at that age is everything.

The kitchen smelled like dust and cinnamon and the lemon oil Mama rubbed into the cabinet doors every spring, the same ritual every April, the same cloth, the same slow careful attention to wood she had been tending for forty years. I had a cardboard box by my feet marked DONATE, which was optimistic on my part because I could not imagine who in the immediate vicinity needed eleven cans of beets, but the box made the work feel organized and organization was what I had instead of composure that day.

The flour tin was heavier than it should have been.