The salt stains on the entryway rug had dried into stiff gray crusts by the time Emily came home.
I was at the stove, slicing carrots for the stew while the old refrigerator kept up its steady, low hum. Emily did not take off her boots, but stood by the back door, watching the white patches melt against the glass of the porch windows.
“Arthur,” she said, using my name instead of Grandfather. “Why was the police report from the night of the accident never filed in the county registry?”
My hand slipped, and the kitchen knife hit the cutting board with a sharp thud, rolling onto its side near the parings.
“The county had their own filing system back then,” I said, clearing my throat before speaking of the past. “Everything went into the basement archives after the state inspectors finished.”
She did not look back at me, her fingers busy twisting a silver paperclip into a straight wire.
“A routine legal query should still show a record index number,” she said, using that dry paralegal vocabulary she had picked up at her new desk in town. “There isn’t one.”
I rinsed the knife under the cold tap, letting the water run over my fingers until they were numb.
“We had the funeral to think about,” I said. “We didn’t need to chase papers.”
Later, after we finished a pot of black tea that had cost me two dollars at the corner market, we moved into the living room.
I brought the green wool blanket from the cedar chest to fold it, smoothing the worn edges with my palms. Emily sat on the sofa with her old childhood scrapbook open on her knees, her thumb tracing the corner of a faded color photograph.
It was a picture of our old Buick in the driveway, and just behind the rear bumper, the corner of a black-and-white county patrol car was visible.
“Officer Vance was at our door before the hospital even called,” she said, pointing to the shiny fender in the background. “How did he get from the county line to Elm Street so fast?”
