It had been a year since her father had left the world. Right at the end of the month. Without circumstance.
It had been decided that they would find a place for all of his things within that time. They had started with the books, all interrupted at various points in their middles with the printed-out train tickets he used to mark his place, invariably more faded than the stories they were nestled inside. The ones they hadn’t read already were paired with the wine bottles in the kitchen, appearing far more aesthetically refined together than anything they could have curated through deliberate selection. The assortment of volumes and reds seemed to speak to each other’s significance, to signal a greater meaning being embodied by the space for living the two of them had gradually composed for themselves. Most of the other things went to boxes, to her siblings, to collectors who lived 90 minutes in the direction away from the city, taking up the larger part of multiple Saturdays.
By the time an unusually warm spring had silently given way to an unusually mild summer, they had found a place for everything, with the exception of the oak and leather chair. It was one of those objects that, growing up, had always been more broken in than the rest of her house. Only her father used it, pulling it out to his right as he came to the table and scooting it in behind him as he sat for dinner. Both of these motions were performed without any excess of effort, their rhythm familiar and carefully controlled. The sounds of its legs placed on the floor were an accepted signal that she could begin to retrieve her silverware from the sides of her plate. When guests were hosted, they always volunteered to sit elsewhere along the table. There was a sense that sitting in the chair was a learned activity, something you couldn’t fall into absent any assumptions or thought. For all the seamlessness it took on, as part of the scenery of every dinner she had at home, it was clear that her father’s manner of being present as he sat there was a conscious practice.
It was a manner of which they both knew acutely they weren’t capable. To make no mention of the fact that the chair didn’t go with anything else in their kitchen. It threw all the other objects they had accumulated into sharp relief, not able to help but accentuate how designed, how purchased, everything in their house was. Everything was still too pristine, defined by the idea of their life right now, not yet broken in with the textures of its experience. They seemed to have spent the entire year waiting for the point past which this phase of their lives would exist independent of their conceptions. The point past which it would manifest in all the little details they left unnoticed, its material beginning to grow worn, inscribed with creases and tears and indentations small enough to hold ghosts.