She mailed it and went back to sorting.
The system was simple. Three boxes on the dining table, each with a strip of masking tape and a word in her mother's handwriting — which was funny, because these were her mother's things and her mother had apparently labeled them in advance, as if she'd known this day was coming and wanted to make it easier.
DISCARD. HANDLE. KEEP.
Discard was for the obvious: expired coupons, magazines with address labels she'd peeled and re-stuck, grocery lists in a shorthand only her mother understood. Handle was for the things that required action — the insurance paperwork, the title to the Buick, a letter from someone named Gerald that began Dear Margot, I am writing to inform you and stopped there, as if Gerald too had lost the thread. Keep was for what you kept.
She'd been at it three hours. Discard was nearly full. Handle had seven items. Keep had four.
Then there was the other pile.
It sat on the chair to her left, and she didn't know when it had started. She hadn't decided to make it. There was no masking tape on the chair, no word in anyone's handwriting. But things kept ending up there — a postcard from Yellowstone with nothing written on it, a photograph of a dog she didn't recognize, a recipe card for something called Impossible Pie that had been folded so many times the creases had gone white. A knitting pattern for a child's sweater, size 4T, with a pencil note in the margin: too small already.
They weren't things to throw away. They weren't things to handle. They weren't things to keep, not in the way the box meant it — the meaning-laden way, the way that implied you were keeping them for something, that they'd serve some future purpose, even if the purpose was only to prove that someone had lived.
They were just things that didn't go in the other three boxes.
She picked up the recipe card. Impossible Pie. She'd never heard of it. The ingredients were ordinary — eggs, butter, coconut, sugar, Bisquick. The note at the bottom said: Makes its own crust. She turned it over. Blank. She held it for a moment, then put it back on the chair.
Her sister called at four.
"How's it going?"
"Fine. I'm sorting."
"What's the system?"
"Mom labeled boxes."
Her sister was quiet for a moment. "That sounds like her."
"There's a pile on the chair that doesn't fit."
"Fit what?"
"The boxes."
"What's in it?"
She looked at the pile. "A postcard. A recipe. A knitting pattern."
"Keep them."
"They don't go in Keep."
"Then Handle."
"There's nothing to handle."
"Rae," her sister said. "Just pick a box."
After she hung up she sat with her hands on the table and looked at the three boxes and the chair. The apartment was quiet the way it hadn't been when her mother was alive — her mother who had labeled everything, who had put the recycling out on Tuesdays and the trash on Fridays, who had understood that a system only works if you trust it.
She picked up the photograph of the unknown dog. Some kind of terrier mix, sitting on a porch she didn't recognize. The photograph was sharp and the light was good. Someone had taken care with it. On the back, in a hand that wasn't her mother's: This is Bean.
That was all. This is Bean.
She didn't know who Bean was. She didn't know whose porch. She didn't know whose handwriting, or why her mother had kept the photograph, or whether it had meant anything to her or was just something that had ended up in a drawer because drawers are where things end up when you don't know where they go.
She put it back on the chair.
The pile wasn't large. Maybe fifteen things. But it had a weight the other boxes didn't — the weight of things that had resisted sorting not because they were difficult but because they were themselves, complete, unparaphrasable, and she couldn't bring herself to push them into a category that would tell them what they meant.
The knitting pattern was for a sweater no one would wear. The recipe was for a pie no one would bake. The photograph was of a dog no one alive could name.
She mailed the Handle box. She carried Discard to the dumpster. She put Keep in the trunk of her car.
The pile on the chair she put in a shoebox and took home and set on the shelf in her closet, behind the winter hats. She didn't label it. Labeling it would have been the same as choosing a box, and the whole point — if it had a point — was that she hadn't.
Twice in the next year she thought about opening it. Both times she didn't. Not because she was afraid of what was inside, but because she knew that opening it would feel like sorting, and the things in the box had survived this long precisely by not being sorted.
The third time, she did open it. She was looking for a hat.
She sat on the closet floor with the shoebox on her knees and took out each thing, one at a time. The postcard. Bean. Impossible Pie. The sweater pattern. A button. A torn-off corner of newspaper with a phone number and the word Tuesday. All the unsortable things.
She didn't sort them.
She just held them for a while, and then she put them back, and then she went to find a hat.