ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 103: To Move?

Suddenly it comes to me. I must move from this place Ernie and I shared the last five years of his life.

I realize why I resist cleaning it. Why I don’t like to stand up in it or pass through it. Why, when I leave it, I dread coming back to it. Ernie’s not here, yet his presence is everywhere here. His collection of books, hundreds of them: novels, first editions, mysteries including a run of Sue Grafton works, the David Wark Griffith biographies. And Ernie’s own manuscripts in their white boxes, with their titles written in his own hand. All too much.

I go into the bedroom only for clothes. I avoid our carved, gilded, caned bed. Ernie didn’t die on that bed, but he lay dying on it. In his last month or so, he and Joshua played cards atop it. One night he looked over at me — sitting in a nearby chair watching them — and said: “Hello, little girl.” All that time I thought he called me little girl because he thought I looked younger than my years. No, that wasn’t it at all.

Joshua will not visit this place. Too full of his daddy.

I will move. I will take what I want from it and sell the rest. I must live a simple life. I don’t want all these things. I don’t want to cling to all these things.

Ernie’s been gone sixteen months. I don’t want to live here any longer. Or, maybe I just don’t want to live, no matter where I am. Maybe that’s it. Sometimes, that’s it.