"Why don't you just sell the house?" said the inspector, a grizzled man with a long, salt and pepper beard. He had a deep timbre to his voice, like a distant mountain. "Your other options are to die alone, or to live alone."
"I can't leave it empty," I said, my heart breaking. "The house is full of memories."
"Well, you should have cleaned up the mess sooner."
The inspector was balding and chubby, but seemed competent. His eyes were sad. I tried to imagine what it was like to have to live with watching your home deteriorate before your eyes. All one could do was work to fix it. There were holes in walls and floors, and it seemed like everything was coming apart around us. The inspector opened my front door, and we surveyed the house.
"You really shouldn't wait too long," he said. "You're going to need to let people into the house, but you shouldn't wait so long that you have to start working with relatives and friends you don't really know-people who you'll end up letting into your house without really getting to know as well. And you shouldn't wait too long, because when you do let people into the house, it'll be time to find a new job, which means leaving the house, sooner. Or maybe you should stay where you are? It's up to you."
He turned to me, holding a piece of paper in his hand.
"The problem is, if you leave your house for months on end, and you don't fix everything, you'll end up with a house full of mess and dirt, which will make it hard for you to sell the house."
I looked at the paper he was holding. The paper had a crisp, familiar feel.
"You remember this?" he asked.
"The repair list?" I asked.
The inspector walked around the room, touching things. "I gave you an As for everything you checked on this list. You would have passed with a B grade a few years ago," he said. "I doubt you pass now with an As. You would have been fine."
I decided to leave the house when he left. Shoring up walls and cabinets, painting floors, and putting in new carpet would have taken months, if my house had been torn apart first.
I thought of throwing out all the broken ends of my life. All I had left of her was her wedding ring, which I kept in a box underneath my bed, every night, before I went to sleep. I stared at it, thinking, "We went to the hospital a few days after the wedding because of a morning sickness. We were both so sick. It was so funny, the look of horror on the nurse's face when she found two new people in such a bad state in a hospital room. They didn't say anything, just looked at her, and she looked at them, confused, like she'd never seen a husband and wife before. She didn't know what to do. She asked me, 'Do we need an ultrasound?' I laughed and held my wife's hand. The nurse looked at my wife and said, 'You aren't due for another half a year. He's probably not even the father.'
"We didn't care. We knew the baby was on its way. It was the first time the nurse looked at us with anything but an uncertain expression. A few days later, she came back again and said something else, but by then, my wife and I were separating again. We hadn't gotten much sleep, and we didn't have enough money to hire a caretaker, so we were going to have to do something. My wife was going to die. I dictated the terms of the will to my wife, but it took us a minute to figure out what everyone wanted. By the time the will was written, the lawyer had left. We handed it to him, and he quickly signed it and ran out the door before we could say anything else. I tried to call the hospital, but it was two in the morning, so I said I'd call back later. I worried about my wife in the night. I had trouble remembering why we were sick, why she had married me, why we held each other so tight. I held on to her hands as long as I could. I've held on to her memory. I'm not letting her go. Even after all these months, I can still smell her."
I took the ring out of the box and held it. There was a warm white glow. I was getting the ring appraised soon. The salesman told me I could schedule an appointment for that later, but I hung on to the ring hard.
The house was clean. Everything was fixed with duct tape and a layer of latex. The carpets were spotless. I hung up new pictures on the walls. The house seemed wrong when I first came back.
The house was too quiet and empty. I opened the door to my old room and sat on the bed. I was lonely after we separated, but she hated feeling lonely, and she hated me when I let her down. Nothing felt right anymore. I closed my eyes and tried to decide what I wanted to do.
I opened my eyes and took a breath. I wanted to go to bed and sleep. I turned the ring over in my hand. It felt heavy, warm and comforting. I couldn't let it go. I had to keep it safe.
I went back downstairs to the living room. The inspector was still there.
"I just wanted to say," he said, "It looks like you're really going to have to fix stuff. If it's not falling apart in two months, you'll have to leave the house. Constantly fixing things will cost you a lot of money, and I don't think your wife would expect you to do that." He sighed. "I guess that means your house is probably going to have to be sold. I suppose you'll probably have to start looking for a new job, too. It's getting late in the day, but maybe you should take this report and sleep on it, and think about what you want to do."
I thanked the inspector. I called my family and asked them to get me more duct tape, since there wasn't any in the house. They couldn't help me. I called the store where I bought the tapes to ask if they had any more left, but the tape had been discontinued.
"We have these new tapes," the person on the phone told me. "They're a lot better than the old ones were. It's a high quality aluminum tape. It won't leave a sticky residue on your clothes. That's the problem with your old tapes, you know. They leave a residue, and that makes you look professional. The problem is, they're not as flexible as the other tapes. If you use the new tapes, you should cover up the older ones. Nope, I'm just joking. It won't stick to itself." The person on the phone laughed. I asked if I could buy a few of their new tapes. The person on the phone said they didn't have any stores in my area, but they would mail me a few rolls for free.
I opened the package and found the tapes to be extremely sticky. I liked the way they felt. They had a rough, grainy feel to them. They felt good when I would bend the tape into knots. I walked to my windows and looked outside. I told myself, "We need to do something. I need to fix the stuff inside the house. Your house is empty. You need more soundproofing. You need carpets." I remembered the brochures I found on the table by the door. I had bought them a couple months ago when we bought the house. "I bought all these new living room furniture for the new house. We should try making a room work better, but we don't really know how. We'll just keep trying to move things around until we have something different. Maybe that will work. I guess we can try to be like normal people. I wonder if that means that we should get a new house."
