The Drawer

The farmhouse had been divided in principle for years. In practice it came down, as these things do, to a drawer of spoons no sister would claim and none would surrender. Their mother had not left a will so much as a silence, and into that silence the three of them had poured every old argument they owned. The house could be sold. The land could be valued. But the spoons were the good spoons, the Sunday spoons, the ones that had stirred every cup of tea any of them had ever cried into, and a valuer could not put a number on that, and so the drawer stayed shut, and so did they.