That was yesterday. There's a big tear-blotch on the paper; these felt point pens run when they're wet.
Daddy and Mother were found dead in the car in the garage with the door shut and overcoats and rugs stuffed against it and the car windows down and the key on and the gas gauge on empty. Carbon monoxide poisoning. No note. There was an overdrawn notice on the living room table beside the lamp, and a piece of baloney and a half-pint of milk in the refrigerator. We went, with Aunt Isobel taking charge and bustling me along, thank God, and somehow we got through the funeral and burial and the life insurance man told her they would pay even though it was suicide: Daddy had a thousand-dollar policy and another one for thirty-five-hundred. The house was rented, of course, and the car worth about a hundred dollars.
She sat me down and stared into my face; she had to hold my chin up with one kid-gloved hand.
"Tory. Listen a moment, and think carefully. Do you want anything from here?" I shook my head.
"Nothing? Not even a remembrance? A letter-opener or an old lamp or an old teddy-bear or whatever? Nothing?"
I shook my head.
She told somebody she knew to sell the car for whatever it brought, auction or give away everything else, take anything he wanted, pay off the funeral home and anything else Daddy owed, and keep what was left as his fee. She turned aside when he started to talk, probably to say no, he'd do it for nothing, and she scribbled something out and signed it. She handed it to him.
We left. We returned to Denver. A week later a box came in the mail. She showed it to me, told me it was a memento from home, and asked if I wanted to open it. I didn't. She put it in the top of the front hall closet. It wasn't all that simple; we both had to sign legal thing and all that, but I think all that's over by now. I am an orphan. I live in Denver, with my fairy Godmother, who was my father's sister – and whom I call Isobel because she's tired of hearing "Aunt" and says it's a terrible waste of breath to preface her name with it all the time.
I wished I were dead for a long while, wished I'd been there to die with them. I'm over that now.