All the Winters After by Seré Prince Halverson

rooms. In the bathroom, there were even Amway and Shaklee products. His mom had been such a supporter of Snag, his dad would complain that the products were taking over the household. Stacked five rows deep in the barn, the pantry, the cupboards; enough, apparently, to last at least twenty years.
    He turned on the faucet. The pipes seemed to be in working order. In the pantry, home-canned goods lined the shelves—garden vegetables, rhubarb and berry jams, salmon and meats, mushrooms, tomato sauces, soups, sauerkraut, relishes. Potted herbs sat along the windowsill next to the old kitchen table. He went down into the root cellar, stocked with boxes of potatoes and onions, hanging red cabbages, and some dried fish and meat. Tally marks had been carved into the wall, almost covering it. He didn’t count them, but it looked like there could be enough to account for ten years. Or a lot of dead buried bodies. The family’s old refrigerator held frozen fish and meats. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling.
    Someone undoubtedly helped her with all of this. And who paid the electricity bill?
    He climbed back up to the main floor, hesitated before heading up to the second floor. This was his house. He had every right to look around. But he paused again before he entered his parents’ room. The pauses came with a sense of reverence, as if he were entering a church or a museum. Everything—every single thing—in the entire house had been so well tended, so obviously respected by this Nadia.
    The quilt his mother made still covered the bed. As a small boy, he would race his matchbox cars along the quilt’s patterns—roadways, as he saw them. Until a wheel caught on a stitch, pulling a piece of fabric loose, and his mother put an end to that game. He sat on the bed, running his hand along it until he found the spot where the missing piece exposed strands of batting. Even this room was not cloaked in dust as he’d expected. He opened the closet and saw their clothes, his father’s heavy jackets and creased boots, his mother’s red down jacket. Everyone commented on how his mother managed to look fashionable in whatever she wore, no matter how functional. He never knew much about fashion, but he knew his mom always stood out in a crowd.
    â€œMom,” he whispered. “Mom, Mom, Mom.” He stuck his nose in her sweater and inhaled, but it no longer smelled of her. On the dresser though was a bottle of her perfume: White Linen. He opened it and there it was. Once when he was Christmas shopping with Janie, he saw the perfume on display and picked up the tester, smelled it, and wished he hadn’t. The saleswoman took the bottle from him, sprayed it on a piece of white textured card stock, like a bookmark to hold his place, and handed it to him. He had set the paper reminder of his mom back on the glass counter and walked away. But now he pressed the gold cylinder top on the dispenser and shot the scent of his mother across the room.
    Goddamn it. There is no getting around grief.
    Even if you turned your back on it, diligently refused to answer its call, it would badger you, forever demanding payment. And oh, could it wait; it would not move on. Grief was a fucking collections company, and it was never fully satisfied. It would always keep showing up out of the blue, tacking on more interest.
    His mom’s books lined the walls in the bedroom too. He’d known she loved to read, but he hadn’t realized that they’d lived in what other people might classify as a library. She’d worked in the book business in New York before she’d met his father. She moved here willingly, even enthusiastically, carrying her designer clothes and hundreds of books to this far edge of the world.
    And there was the big, old steamer trunk at the end of the bed. The one she’d kept locked, with her journals inside; the one no longer locked, the brass tongues sticking out at him. He lifted the