Little Sister by Patricia MacDonald

around here. Look,” she said, “I’ve got a lot to do, so I’m going to get started.”
    Leaving Francie in the kitchen, Beth picked up an empty grocery bag, went down the hall and reluctantly opened the door to the room which her parents had shared. She felt like an intruder in the dark, stuffy room, though she knew that neither of them would ever return to it. The room was neat except for one of her father’s shirts, which lay at the foot of the bed, two pens still clipped to the pocket. She looked around the room. Everything else in it was exactly the same as it had been when her mother was alive. For a moment she had the terrible thought that perhaps he had never bothered to clean out her mother’s things, and it made her feel almost faint with dismay. She walked to the closet and opened the door with trepidation. Only men’s clothes hung there. She let out a sigh of relief and then looked in again. The clothes would have to be sorted and folded into boxes. She did not feel like doing that right now. She reached up to the top shelf of the closet and pulled down a shoebox with one ripped corner. The contents clinked and shifted as she moved it, so she knew it didn’t contain shoes. She put the box down on the bed without opening it. Then she walked over to her father’s bureau and opened the top drawer. The drawer was filled with a daunting jumble of items. She took the drawer out of the bureau and dumped it onto the bedspread beside the shoebox.
    As she looked down at the motley assortment, she was dimly aware of the doorbell’s ringing, and then she heard Francie’s footsteps clattering down the stairs in response. Sir Lancelot has arrived, she thought with a smile.
    She sat down on the bed and opened the top of the shoebox. It was filled with a sparse selection of men’s jewelry, army memorabilia, and other scraps of things such as toothpicks, matchbooks, and loose change. A wave of inertia swept over Beth as she began to pick through this collection. Every single item required a decision. Was it old or new? Valuable or worthless, gold or brass? There were broken watches and medals with ribbons attached. She knew that they must be mementos of something, but she had no idea of what. Weariness engulfed her, and she felt like putting the lid back on the box and just turning her back on it. Do it now, she told herself. Get it done. It won’t just go away.
    She began to sort, throwing everything that she was in doubt about into the empty brown bag and trying to keep only the things she was certain were of value. After a little while the odor of the hamburgers cooking filled the house. She realized that she was hungry when her stomach growled, but she doggedly kept on with her task, trying to get as much done as she could before supper. She looked at the clock on the night table before she unplugged it and decided to put it in a pile designated for the church. Six o’clock. What an ungodly hour to have dinner. It was the very time that they had always eaten when she was a girl.
    Opening another drawer in the bureau, Beth found the old, battered wallet that her father had always carried. It had a rubber band around it. Someone must have put it in there after he had been taken away by the undertaker. Beth removed the rubber band, opened it up and looked inside. There were a few wrinkled dollar bills in the billfold and a couple of cards in the pocket. She pulled them out. There was his faded Social Security card, his driver’s license, and an ID card from the electric company with a photo on it of him, pale and scowling, that made him look like a convict. There was an insurance agent’s calling card, and Beth dimly remembered speaking to the man after the funeral. He had tried to explain the terms of her father’s small life insurance policy to her, although she had not felt like listening. The wallet also held a yellow paid receipt for a local plumber and one picture, a wallet-size school portrait of Francie.