the last box out of the house

The day we moved my parents out, my mother kept finding reasons to go back inside. One more cupboard, one more look under the stairs. Forty years in that house, and my height and my brother's height still climbing the inside of the airing cupboard door in pencil, which is the one thing you cannot pack.

I carried the last box to the car and my father locked the front door the way he had locked it every night of my childhood, one hard pull, the knee against the bottom. He put the keys through the letterbox. Nobody said anything the whole drive, and my mother held the fern on her lap like a baby.