Probably because they were too much to carry wherever he was going. Or because he didn’t think they’d be useful. Clothes; my parents’ lab coats; my father’s glasses; a flightless paper kite I made when I was young; yellowed books about war or romance; my father’s twenty-first-century atlas.I flip through all the pieces of my childhood, and the books my parents read to escape work for a while, and I ignore the memories and the pain that fly up with the dust, because there is something more pressing that I want.“What are you looking for?” Gabriel says. He helps me, carefully unfolding and refolding the clothes, checking the jewelry box and finding it empty. Even the globe necklace is absent. I hope my brother didn’t sell my mother’s necklaces and rings for money, though hope seems stupid at this point.“Seeds,” I say. “My mother’s lily seeds.”Maddie is a few yards away, studying an abandoned wasp nest on the ground.“Maybe we dropped them while we were moving things around,”
