The Last Box
The staircase still smelled like lemon oil, though the men had already carried off the console table where the housekeeper used to set the bowl of polish. Lila stood at the top of it, one hand on the banister, and watched two movers in matching navy polos maneuver her mother's piano through the front doors like pallbearers easing a casket down a church aisle. She counted the seconds it took them to clear the frame. Nine. Ten. She noted, absurdly, that they were careful with the legs but not with the bench, which one man kicked sideways to fit through the gap, and some part of her brain—the part that used to negotiate freight contracts before she was old enough to vote—filed the fact away as though it might matter later. As though there would be a later that involved that piano.
There wouldn't. She knew that. She made herself say it silently, the way she'd once forced herself to memorize multiplication tables: *the piano is gone, the piano belongs to someone else now, the piano is a line item, it is not a memory, it cannot be a memory if you don't let it become one.*
She descended the stairs slowly, palm trailing along the mahogany rail that would, in a few hours, belong to a…
