At 7:12 on a Saturday morning, the old kitchen cabinets were still stacked beneath a jacaranda tree, the driveway was already crowded, and a line of dark clouds was creeping over the San Gabriel Mountains. Elena stood at the curb in Pasadena, holding a coffee gone cold. By sunset, her family had to clear the house where her grandfather had lived for nearly fifty years. The hardest part, she realized, wasn’t deciding what to keep. It was figuring out what to do with everything else.
Across the street, a dumpster-removal truck rumbled past, its engine briefly drowning out the sparrows. Elena looked at the pile again: splintered shelves, a water-stained mattress, broken tile, and boxes whose contents nobody had identified.
