The woman selling the treadmill tells me it belonged to her husband Richard. Six weeks ago, he collapsed in the Walmart parking lot and hit his head. She runs her finger in an arc from her temple to behind her ear to illustrate the length of the incision doctors made to relieve the pressure. She recounts the harrowing ride to the hospital, the beside vigil, and  – shaking her head –  No hope. No hope. 

No detail of her ordeal is too small. The neighbors drove her to pick up Richard's car. The pharmacy called to remind her that Richard's prescriptions were waiting, and she had to tell them the medicines were no longer necessary. She finishes with a rueful smile, and says "Richard was tight with money. He would have been happy he went before he paid for those pills!" She laughs and it cuts out somewhere in her neck.

She's told this story before, in the same words and gestures, the strangled laugh. To every relative, neighbor and acquaintance, the pharmacist and the Walmart store manager, worried about a lawsuit. To the man who came to buy Richard's Toyota Avalon, a ‘98 with only 40,000 miles on it. To me, responding to a Craigslist ad.. She'll tell the story until it makes perfect sense. Of course he died. Every story has an ending, and that's how people end.

One day, as she delivers the final sentence, the laugh will breach the lump in her throat, tumble across her tongue and emerge from her lips as an honest note of mirth. After that, the details of that day will fall away.  For now, she'll tell the long version. For now, Richard's possessions are  listed under "household" but to her they are "relics" and we buy the sacred treadmill without haggling.

We rarely buy anything new, so our home is full of such relics and stories.  I have my favorites -- a series of black and white photographs of a dog that looks just like my Trinket, a stainless cake carrier from the fifties, a cherry sideboard a previous owner painted a cheeky lavender, and then there's Camille's nightgown. 

As a thrift store shopper, I know that when you see clothes marked "Miss Ruby" or "Williams 406" written with a Sharpie Rub-a-Dub, those are nursing home clothes. Usually, they're the  type of garments used to dress uncooperative limbs – elastic waist pants and button–front shirts, permanent press. Camille's nightgown is different.  It's made of white batiste, hand sewn with French seams and rolled hems, heirloom lace at the wrists and collar, materials of beloved quality. The name "Camille L." is scribbled on the back of the neck in black waterproof ink.

Her story comes to me in bits, as I drift off to sleep, running my hand over the soft cotton fabric.

Her name is Camille Lancaster. Like many women of her generation, like her own mother, she is a teacher; the rituals and cadence of a school are familiar and comforting. She likes a gin and tonic, after five, on Saturdays. In the evenings and during the summer break, she sews for herself and her daughters, brushed corduroy skirts and Liberty of London print blouses. Sometimes she thinks swear words when she makes buttonholes, and crosses herself.

She is adored by her class of fourth graders. Although she runs a proper classroom, she doesn't own a paddle and her worst punishment is a shocked expression that turns to hurt and then to worry.  If the weather disallows recess, she reads aloud to them in a voice that's reminiscent of coat lining, or the binding on a baby blanket. Since school started, she's read Miss Hickory, The Wheel on the School and Johnny Tremain. Now she's reading Where the Red Fern Grows and they're at the end. In fact, the weather is fine, overcast but warm, without the smell of rain, yet the children have chosen to stay indoors, to hear the rest of what happened to Old Dan and Little Ann. Mrs. Lancaster settles into the rocking chair she's brought from home, opens the book and begins to read...

"I found her lying on her stomach, her hind legs stretched out straight, and her front feet folded under her chest. She had laid her head on his grave. I saw the trail where she had dragged herself through the leaves. The way she lay there, I thought she was alive. I called her name. She made no movement. With the last ounce of strength in her body, she had dragged herself to the grave of Old Dan. 

Kneeling by her side, I reached out and touched her. There was no response, no whimpering cry or friendly wag of her tail. My little dog was dead." 

Mrs. Lancaster's voice goes wobbly and she can hardly read on, to the parts where he buries Little Ann next to Old Dan and carves their names in stone and discovers a red fern, a sacred red fern, planted by an angel, covering their graves.

By then the entire class is sobbing. Boys and girls alike sniffle into the arms they have folded on their desks. Even the class cut-up, a fidgety boy who can't control his eyebrows and isn't allowed to use the pencil sharpener anymore, his mouth is closed tight and twisted with grief. 

Mrs. Lancaster, Camille, dabs  the corner of each eye with the pad of her middle finger. "Oh my. Oh my," she sighs. "Class, just ignore me." But they couldn't do that, even if they wanted.

I would end her story there, before the marker in her clothes.

Some stories, some deaths, resist embellishment and refuse foreshortened or watery endings, ferns and angels.  Ben, my twin brother, died fifteen years ago. Suicide is a one word story. Doesn't matter how many times you tell it, it won't make sense. Yet in the days and weeks after his death, we were forced to tell it, to say the hateful word, over and over. The only detail anyone wanted was – how? The question would dangle, asked or unasked. You could see them spinning the wheel of weaponry.  I used to lie awake and think up fantastic alternatives – "vat of acid," "lead poisoning," or "with one of those stupid knit ties guys wore in the 80's. Remember those?" I never said any of them; it isn't in me to reward curiosity with cruelty. I couldn't use action verbs, so I learned to say, "He had a gun."

While I don't mind at all living amid the relics of strangers, writing their stories, walking in the footsteps of a dead man – Richard's pre-programmed regimen of speeds and inclines – and I see nothing macabre about sleeping in the nightgown of a dead woman, I can't own anything of Ben's, not even or especially, his words. My body is already a Reliquary of Ben. I must eat, drink, live, love and accomplish for two, the endless pregnancy of an absorbed twin. I can't carry his possessions or ghostwrite his novel as well.

I know when my parents die I'll find the stash, remnants of Ben they couldn't bear to part with, and I'll have to decide what to do with them, these relics that are also evidence. But I don't have to make those decisions today. Today I must endure one more birthday without cake. I tell myself that's the worst part. There is never any cake.