Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn

But it’s not like we had the choice of many a place
We made the decision: We made this our space.
Let’s take our love to this little brown house
Gimme some goodwill, you hot lovin’ spouse!
This one was more cryptic than the others, but I was sure I had it right.
Amy was conceding Carthage, finally forgiving me for moving back here.
Maybe you feel guilty for bringing me here … [but] We made this our space.
The little brown house was my father’s house, which was actually blue, but
Amy was making another inside joke. I’d always liked our inside jokes the
best – they made me feel more connected to Amy than any amount of
confessional truth-telling or passionate lovemaking or talk-till-sunrising. The
little brown house story was about my father, and Amy is the only person I’d
ever told it to: that after the divorce, I saw him so seldom that I decided to
think of him as a character in a storybook. He was not my actual father – who
would have loved me and spent time with me – but a benevolent and vaguely
important figure named Mr Brown, who was very busy doing very important
things for the United States and who (very) occasionally used me as a cover
to move more easily about town. Amy got tears in her eyes when I told her
this, which I hadn’t meant, I’d meant it as a kids are funny story. She told me
she was my family now, that she loved me enough to make up for ten crappy
fathers, and that we were now the Dunnes, the two of us. And then she
whispered in my ear, ‘I do have an assignment you might be good for …’
As for bringing back the goodwill, that was another conciliation. After my
father was completely lost to the Alzheimer’s, we decided to sell his place, so
Amy and I went through his house, putting together boxes for Goodwill.
Amy, of course, was a whirling dervish of doing – pack, store, toss – while I
sifted through my father’s things glacially. For me, everything was a clue. A
mug with deeper coffee stains than the others must be his favorite. Was it a
gift? Who gave it to him? Or did he buy it himself? I pictured my father
finding the very act of shopping emasculating. Still, an inspection of his
closet revealed five pairs of shoes, shiny new, still in their boxes. Had he
bought these himself, picturing a different, more social Bill Dunne than the
one slowly unspooling alone? Did he go to Shoe-Be-Doo-Be, get my mother
to help him, just another in a long line of her casual kindnesses? Of course, I
didn’t share any of these musings with Amy, so I’m sure I came off as the
goldbricker I so often am.
‘Here. A box. For Goodwill,’ she said, catching me on the floor, leaning
against a wall, staring at a shoe. ‘You put the shoes in the box. Okay?’ I was
embarrassed, I snarled at her, she snapped at me, and … the usual.