While Vincent and my brother discussed how to dispense with Lillian’s 1984 Buick with 28,000 miles on it, I was thinking that the job of dealing with the belongings of the deceased probably goes to the oldest daughter in most families, just like the oldest male usually handles the business of the estate. And then it all clicked; my brother was being humiliated for what my aunt viewed as his neglect of her, but, given her regard for the idea (if not the reality) of family, there was no way she would deprive him of his inheritance. Since Vincent started handling her business affairs, she had often talked to me in reverential tones about her new attorney—the same way my mother always talked about my brother, the way all Italian and Italian-American mothers talk about their firstborn sons. I do believe Vincent, the image of her father, had become Lillian’s surrogate son. For his trouble, Vincent ended up with ten percent of her estate on top of his fees. Whether it was sentimentality or a crack in her life-long frugal veneer, I hope the relationship gave my aunt some pleasure; I know her last decade was lonely. At the funeral, Vincent showed up again, to my eyes, as the dapper, aloof Sonny. He shed a few tears, talked up my aunt’s elderly female friends, and, as he left, said, “Vicki (my aunt was the last person I let call me by that nickname), I can’t do anything with the estate until you get that house cleared out.”
      In the next painful instant, or so it seemed, my brother drove off, leaving me alone in Lillian’s increasingly eerie house. To cope with the encroaching sadness, I got manically busy. I filled the Buick with eight loads of clothes and then drove each load to the Salvation Army center. Unable to find a key, I broke into my aunt’s locked, windowless, six-by-nine foot storeroom. It was packed floor to ceiling with canned goods sporting expiration labels that went back fifteen or twenty years: Dole Peaches, “Best if used by 8-1-88”; 6 oz. Stella Doro Tomato Sauce, “Jan. ’95.” Her church promised to send someone over to take whatever was usable for their food bank.
      In Nana’s old bedroom, I came upon hundreds of skeins of knitting and crochet yarns—every shade of color imaginable with yellowing instructions in Italian. Nana died in 1978; regardless, 26 years later, her projects lay perfectly intact, as if she’d return any minute to finish that lovely sweater or blanket. Gloria, next door, came up with the idea of taking all of the yarn to the nursing home where she volunteered. That made me ridiculously happy.
      But for every bag of things delivered to a worthy recipient, ten more cartons of junk seemed to appear from nowhere. My compulsive cleaning and clearing were doing a poor job of masking familiar feelings of shame. In each new storage space I entered, metaphors for the emotional distance between my aunt and me came literally crawling out of the woodwork: an endless supply of bags, each stuffed with dozens more empty paper and plastic bags; wrapping paper ready for reuse; a linen closet full of flimsy towels and sheets, which, if mine, would have been relegated to car washing or dusting. Inevitably, I turned the task of clearing out my aunt’s house into a test of character I was doomed to fail.