I hung up my hoodies. My jeans. My old PT shirts with the letters worn soft.
I put my books back on the shelves. I unwrapped my framed photos one at a time and wiped the glass. There was one of me and my grandfather on the porch when I was sixteen, both of us holding root beers, both of us squinting into the sun.
I put that one on my nightstand.
Then I went down to the garage.
My grandfather’s leather armchair was sitting in the corner of the workshop under a canvas tarp. Vance had covered it carefully. He’d even put a piece of cardboard under the feet so they wouldn’t sit on the cold floor.
It took me an hour to get it back into the living room by myself. I bumped it into the doorframe twice. I scraped my knuckles. I said a few words my grandfather wouldn’t have approved of.
When I finally set it down by the window, in the exact spot where it had sat for forty years, I stood back and looked at it.
The big gray sectional was gone. Chloe took it with her. The TV was gone. The BLESSED sign was gone.
It was just the chair, the window, the pine trees outside, and the late afternoon light coming in low and gold across the floor.
It looked like home.
I sat down in it. The leather was cold, then warm.
The last bag in the hallway was the one with my combat boots in it.
I brought it into the living room and untied it and took them out. They were still dusty. There was a little bit of sand in the treads. Sand from the other side of the world.
I set them by the front door, next to the coat hooks. Where they belonged.
