By four only the wardrobe remains. He sits on the top step. The tape's roll has printed itself in his thumb.
He began with the drawers. License, receipts, four years of renewal stubs in a rubber band. The certificate with two stamps. Into a carrier bag. Then the plates, wrapped in newspaper. Two went aside without his deciding. Later he found them in his bag.
His mother had unwrapped those plates with a knife. Thirty-one years ago, in this room. His father and he were carrying the wardrobe up sideways. At the turn his father's shirt pulled out. His own wrist was caught between the wood and the rail.
"It'll never come down," his father said.
"Be quiet and lift."
He signed the first renewal the winter after his mother died. He thought the price reasonable.
The service was good. He stopped bracing at the door. Learned to hear her before he saw the room. They argued about money, about his brother. Once he reached for her plate while they quarreled. His hand closed on the cold table.
"Let me finish," she said.
He kept his hand there. She finished. He stayed another hour.
Then a Thursday he forgot. A call taken at work, one ear covered. A letter. At the lapse, the standard voice said its four sentences.
The little host had stood on the shelf by the window. One humming note. Now it was gone. For eleven months he came each second Sunday. He dusted the empty shelf.
The wardrobe lifts an inch. Goes back down. He takes its door off. Measures the half-landing. No difference.
One van man suggests the window, then looks at it. The other asks if he has eaten. He shakes his head. The man feels in his coat and gives him a wrapped biscuit. Neither mentions it again.
The wardrobe can stay and be charged to the estate, or be broken up at cost. He writes the figure on the back of the hardship schedule. The bag's only clean paper. Crumbs catch in its fold.
Thirty-one years against one wall. A wedding suit. A boiler manual. His father's coat, kept through every clearing-out. His father is a photograph on a stone now. He puts the coat over his arm and measures the turn again.
Under the pictures the paint is darker. He remembers the window open to dry it. His mother on the bare boards, pointing to the only wall their bed would fit. He cannot remember whether he saw this or was told.
He hands in the keys at five. The clerk stays four minutes past her hour. She waits while he moves the coat to find his glasses.
Confirm that the details below are true.
Every one is. He takes his carrier bag down the stair street. Upstairs the wardrobe stands with its door off, awaiting a charge to the estate. Somebody will photograph it with a folded rule for scale.