Page 17 of A Christmas Mystery

“I like brown.”

“Of course you do.”

“If you want to pick out art for the walls, I’d be happy to buy and hang it, but you’ve got to already know I’d be useless at figuring it out for myself.”

“I suspected.” I’m blushing slightly at the idea of picking out art for Theo’s apartment. It feels like an intimate thing to do, so why do I like the idea of it?

“You want something to drink?”

“I’ll take some water.” I nod toward the two big cardboard boxes set on the floor in front of the couch. “Is this them?”

“Yeah.”

He goes to pour us both some water while I take a seat on the couch. It is a very comfortable couch. I have to give him that much.

When he comes to sit beside me, I sip the water while he leans over to open the closest box.

Inside is a motley assortment of Chris’s stuff from his childhood bedroom. He had everything that really mattered to him in the apartment I cleared out after he died, but he’d obviously left some stuff at his parents’ house. That’s what’s in these boxes.

We pull out textbooks, school notebooks, posters he had on his wall, worn T-shirts, a pair of old sneakers, trophies from track meets he placed in, a framed certificate for being the all-star on the debate team during senior year, some old beer bottles he saved from college. Even the bedding from his bed.

“They must have just piled everything from his room into here,” I say at last, looking at the assorted stuff around us after we empty both boxes.

“Yeah. Maybe they kept something, but I can’t see what.” He smiles down at one of the posters for a local band that was popular when we were in high school. “Most of this stuff didn’t mean anything to him.”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t have left it in their house if it did. I think we can probably trash most of it, unless you want to keep it for some reason. I mean, all these notebooks...” I flip through a couple of them, but there’s nothing in them but some school notes and a few silly sketches. I find one he did of me and tear out the page so I can keep it.

“We can probably give away the bedding and some of the books to the thrift shop. But these shirts are too old for anyone to want.”

“They weren’t even ones he really liked. Let’s just throw them out.”

We get through with school stuff, the bedding and the clothing, sorting between trash and giveaway.

Then Theo picks up a trophy, shaking his head at it.

“He didn’t care about those silly trophies.”

“No.” Decided, he chucks the rest of them into the box we identified as trash.

I’m inspecting one of the beer bottles when I glance over to see Theo looking down at the poster again. “Keep that if you want. Y’all went to a ton of their concerts.”

Theo nods and rolls it up neatly. “You keeping the bottles?”

“I don’t think so. Why on earth would he have kept them?”

“Two of them y’all drank on a date to a waterfall somewhere? The other ones were on your nineteenth birthday.”

I stare down at the bottles, my throat tightening again. The date to the waterfall was when he first told me he loved me. My nineteenth birthday was the first time we had sex.

Chris wasn’t a particularly sentimental man, but he loved me, and he kept these on purpose because of what I meant to him.

I blink down at the bottles until I’ve recovered. “I’ll keep these,” I manage to rasp.

“Okay.” Theo is still for a minute until I’m able to look back up at him. Then he holds up the old sneakers.

I shrug. “Just toss them, I guess.”

We make it through everything else fairly quickly, and nothing else evokes another storm of emotion. Theo closes both boxes by tucking in the flaps on alternating sides and then scrawls TRASH on one and GIVEAWAY on the other.

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