Chapter 7 - The Auction at O Street
The auction notice appeared in the legal classifieds of The Washington Post on a Tuesday morning in March: BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES BANKRUPTCY COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA: PREMISES KNOWN AS 314 O STREET NW, WASHINGTON, DC.
I didn't go to the auction. I didn't need to stand on the limestone steps where my father had once held court with local zoning commissioners and junior judges, watching men in expensive suits bid against each other for mahogany wainscoting and leaded glass windows.
Instead, I stayed in Richmond, sitting at the long oak table in the foundation office with Margaret and two safety engineers from the NTSB, reviewing the architectural plans for the new emergency shelter we were building off Route 1 for families stranded by highway accidents.
"The foundation board voted unanimously to name the intake wing after Lily and Noah," Margaret said, sliding the blueprints across the scarred wood. "The children's play area will have a southern exposure, lots of light, and a small library with books donated by the Richmond public schools."
"No screens," I said, running my finger along the margin of the blueprint where the garden courtyard was marked out in green ink. "Just books. And a sandbox with real sand—the kind that doesn't stain when it gets wet."
"Real sand," Margaret agreed, her voice dropping into that quiet, gravelly tone she used whenever she spoke of things that couldn't be replaced by insurance settlements. "And a bench by the window for you to sit on when you come down from the office."
Around three in the afternoon, my phone rang. This time the caller ID wasn't a Richmond exchange or a Georgetown landline. It was a 703 number—Northern Virginia.
"Claire?"
It was Melissa. Her voice didn't have the high, manic shrillness it had worn on the porch in January. It sounded thin, flat, and washed out, like linen that had been boiled too many times in cheap detergent.
"Melissa," I said.
"We’re moving," she said without preamble. There was no greeting, no inquiry into whether I was alive or dead, no mention of the wedding that had never happened or the twenty-four-thousand-dollar deposit that had vanished into the bankruptcy trustee's general fund. "Mom found a small apartment over a dry cleaner's in Bethesda. Two bedrooms. The kitchen doesn't have a dishwasher, but the rent is month-to-month."
"Where is Dad?" I asked.
There was a long silence on the line—the kind of silence that usually preceded a lawyer’s objection in a crowded courtroom.
"He’s in his study," Melissa whispered, her voice dropping so low I could barely hear her over the hum of the office radiator. "He hasn't left the house—well, the apartment—since the auction closed on Friday. He just sits in the corner with a box of his old case files from the nineteen-eighties, reading briefs he wrote thirty years ago about municipal tax law."
"Why are you calling me, Melissa?"
"Mom wants to know if you have any of Lily’s old clothes," she said, and for a second, a strange, jagged crack appeared in her voice. "The ones in the cedar chest in your guest room. She says... she says she found a small pair of yellow socks in the back of her drawer when she was packing up the laundry room on O Street, and she didn't know what to do with them."
I looked down at my hands. The skin had healed over the scars from the hospital soap, leaving the fingers smooth and pale, like peeled willow twigs.
"Tell her to throw them away," I said.
"Claire—"
May you like
"Tell her," I repeated, my voice as steady as the brick wall outside the window, "that you don't keep things you didn't have time to bury."
I didn't wait for her to answer. I pressed the red button on the screen, laid the phone down flat on the oak table, and went back to measuring the dimensions of the children's library with Margaret’s silver-plated rule.
