The First Box

The apartment still smelled like their mother's tea — cardamom and something floral neither of the three sisters could ever name — which was the detail that finally broke Farah, three minutes after they'd unlocked the door for the first time in eleven days.

"We don't have to do this today," said Maya, the middle sister, the one who had always been better at logistics than feelings, standing in the doorway with a stack of flattened boxes like a shield.

"We do, actually," said Zainab, the eldest, already pulling open the hall closet. "The lease ends Friday. There's no version of this where we don't do it today."

Farah said nothing. She had flown in from the coast the night before, jet-lagged and hollow in a way that had nothing to do with the flight, and she stood now in the center of the small living room touching nothing, as though the furniture might dissolve if she confirmed it was real.

Their mother had lived in this apartment for twenty-two years. Two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen too small for all three of them to stand in at once — which had never once stopped their mother from trying, every Sunday, for two decades.

"I'll start with the kitchen," Zainab said, because someone had to say something, and the kitchen was the room she could bear to enter first.

Maya took the bedroom.

That left Farah with the hallway closet — coats, a broken umbrella, a shoebox on the top shelf that, when she finally worked up the courage to pull it down three hours later, turned out to be full of nothing but birthday cards. Every one Farah had ever sent her mother, going back to a crayon drawing from when she was six, kept in careful chronological order, in a box labeled in their mother's handwriting: my girls, in case I forget.

Farah sat down on the hallway floor and did not get up for a long time.