…somebody cough. I’m not proud of what I did next, which was stand up too fast and say hello into an empty house in a voice I didn’t recognize.He came out of the closet in the hall. Seventy-one years old, in a canvas coat, hands out in front of him already saying don’t call anybody before he was all the way through the door.
Alvin Bierbaum. The brother. The daughter in Cedar Falls has an uncle she has not spoken of in thirty years and did not think to mention to the man selling her mother’s house.
He’d been living in the back bedroom since October. Kept to that one room, used the bulkhead steps, ate cold, ran no lights. The four marks in the carpet were a footlocker he’d moved out of the way to sleep. The clean shelf was clean because it was his shelf, and it was empty because he’d taken everything off it that morning when the auction signs went up in the yard.
He’d figured on being gone before I came. He’d been in the closet for two hours.
I sat down on the floor with my back against the bed, because standing over a man like that is a kind of cruelty, and we talked for a long while about nothing much. Then I asked him what was on the shelf.
Photographs. Him and his sister, before whatever it was that happened between them, which he did not explain and I did not ask.
I called the daughter that night. She listened, and there was a long pause on the line, and then she said a thing I’ll keep to myself.
The house sold in April. Alvin didn’t go to the sale. He’s in a place in Elkader now with a window, and I’ve been out twice, and the photographs are on a shelf.
