ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 101: Healing Time

Sitting at the card table set up in the Charles Street kitchen, Joshua phones Cindi, his ace real-estate agent. “The house is finished, all but a bit of exterior scraping and painting. I promised to show it to you when it was finished. Can you come over?”

Cindi, always so responsive, says: “How about tomorrow at one-thirty? Then I’ll treat you and your mother to lunch.”

Joshua wants the place to look as neat as possible. “I’ll make a run to Goodwill,” he says. “What Goodwill won’t accept, I’ll take to the dumpster.”

We box up the unwanted goods — old curtains and window blinds, a wooden birdhouse, a towel rod — and load it into the front seat of the little red car. Then Joshua goes into the garage, with me following him. “I want to clear out the junk in here, too.”

He takes a hack saw to metal springs that once belonged to a baby bed, saws through enough metal to crack the springs in half, then fits the pieces into the car. As he drives off, I head inside to sweep for a final time. Broom in hand, I go up the attic’s dark winding steps, which look so old-world to me. These steps could be in a house in Dresden, in Hamburg. I feel very German, a German hausfrau, as I sweep.

Joshua comes back from his run, and we prepare to leave. But as always, we linger, going from room to room.

“It’s so cheerful,” he says. “I don’t know when it looks better — the daytime or the nightime.

“I’m grateful for all our time here, Joshua. It has been healing.”