Climate Controlled: A Novel: 1

Somebody has been paying for unit D-114 since 1991.Postal money orders. Cash. A different post office every February. And a name that belongs to a girl who died at seventeen.Ren Mabry manages 1,142 storage units in the Arizona desert. For six years she has walked past Building D four times a day and listened to it hum without once asking why. Then the payments stop, and the law gives her sixty-two days: cut the lock, inventory the contents, and sell a stranger's life to whoever shows up with cash on a Saturday morning in June.What is behind the door is not furniture.It is one woman's entire existence, filed by year. Every dress she wore from the age of five. Every report card, every ribbon, every certificate with her own name on it - and not one photograph of anybody else. A nursing school application, sealed and stamped and never mailed. Fifteen years of a household account book, ruled by hand. A kitchen chair set in the middle of the floor facing the door, its four feet fitted into marks worn in the dust.And a chest freezer, running on an orange extension cord, plugged into a wall that does not belong to her, since March of 1991.Inside it: eighty-four cassette tapes, numbered and dated.On the first one a woman says her name, and the date, and the birth weights of her three children. Then she says: I'm going to tell you what happened, and it isn't going to be enough.She was not running from a violent husband. She was not sick, or poor, or afraid. Nothing had happened to her at all.Ren knows what the law says. It is a room, the contents are property, and the sale is on the sixth of June. She also knows there are three grown children in three Arizona towns who have spent thirty-four years believing their mother walked out and never looked back - and that the only voice that can tell them otherwise is sitting in a freezer in Building D with twenty-eight days left on the clock.Finding out is the easy part. Deciding who has the right to know is not.A quietly devastating novel about the rooms where Americans keep what they can neither carry nor throw away - and about how easily doing the decent thing becomes deciding for somebody else.For readers of Olive Kitteridge, The Vanishing Half, and Demon Copperhead.