Chapter 18

After several months of procrastinating, Katie finally decided that it was time to clean out her mother's home. The house was neat and clean, well organized and appeared to be just as she remembered it. The furniture was old, but still in good shape. She decided not to waste time having an estate sale. She called in a company that specialized in buying the contents of houses that were in an estate situation. They gave her a price for the furniture and appliances and other personal items. Katie knew that the price was low but her time was worth more than the difference. She excluded certain items that were keepsakes and agreed to a final clean-out at the end of the week.

She donated her mother's clothing to the Goodwill organization and spent the last two days going through her desk and file cabinet in her home office. As with everything else in her life her files were all neat and well organized. Katie found copies of old tax returns, paid bills, instruction manuals for items she no longer had, several family photo albums and several files of financial account records and a box of old bank statements.

Katie had two empty storage boxes with her. Anything that she was going to keep went into those boxes. Anything that could be thrown out was placed in the garbage cans. She had just gotten to the last of the desk drawers when the clean-out company arrived. Not wanting to hold them up, Katie grabbed the last of the files and a large manila envelope and threw them into the storage boxes. She'd look through them again when she got home.

She took the storage boxes and several pictures from the walls out to her car. She watched as, one by one, all of her mother's possessions were loaded into a truck. Just before they left she inspected the near empty house. They had done a good job; there was no noticeable damage anywhere. The boss brought her a check, had her sign a bill of sale, and it was done. She picked up the large garbage cans from the office and brought them out to the garage, dumping them into the town's rolling garbage bin and then rolled the bin out to the curb for pickup. She asked one of the neighbors to roll the bin behind the house; she would be back next week to get the place ready for sale.

Katie took one last look around, shed a tear, and headed back to Tucson.

Epilog

The house was sold six months later. Because of its size and location they got a decent price for it. Soon Katie and John settled back into their anything-but-normal lifestyles. The storage boxes with her mother's personal effects and papers were put in the basement under the bar and promptly forgotten. It would be almost ten more years before they would be opened again.

John came home one afternoon after giving a presentation of his now highly-prized research on asteroids. As he opened the door to the apartment, he was greeted by a sight that he never got tired of. Katie was on her hands and knees, dressed in her workout shorts and a tee shirt, her still shapely butt swaying back and forth as she reached over to put papers on one of several piles in front of her.

"Katie O'Hara Strong, you get more beautiful every day."

She turned her head towards him, smiled, shook her butt again and said,

"You'll get to see just how beautiful later, up close and personal. Right now I'm busy trying to sort through my mother's papers. I don't know what made me think about them this afternoon; I suddenly remembered that I never did this after she died."

John could see that the contents of both of the boxes had been emptied out onto the living room floor and that Katie was throwing most of it back into one of them. The rest she was placing in piles on the floor in front of her. She appeared to be almost finished.

"I'm going to open a beer; do you want anything?"

"That sounds good; get me one too, thanks."

John was in the kitchen, looking through the cabinets for something to much on, when he heard Katie exclaim, "Oh my GOD!" and call out to him.

"John, did you ever put anything into these cartons; any of your old papers?"

"No, of course not. I don't think I've ever seen those boxes before and I certainly would never have put anything of mine in them."

With a tremor in her voice, she said, "Come here; look at this."

John put the beers down on the floor as he knelt down next to her and looked at what she was showing him.

"This file was in that envelope from my Mom's desk. When I opened it I found old newspaper clippings about an auto accident. I started to read one of them and realized that they were about the accident that killed your birth parents."

He looked at the yellowed newspaper article and realized that he had seen it before. Getting up he ran into the office that they shared and, from his file cabinet, pulled out the old folder that his father had started for him more than forty years ago.

"Katie, I have my folder right here. Why would your Mom have kept a file about that accident?"

"John, it gets worse. You never told me that you had an older sister."

"Yeah, they never found her. The police figured that someone reached into the car and took her out of her car seat before they arrived on the scene."

"John, you still don't get it do you? My mother lived in the apartment complex right there at the scene of the accident."