The Savings Her Father Never Mentioned
My sister’s spare room
Cecelia lives twenty minutes upriver from Cataract Falls, in the house she and her husband bought the year the second of their two boys was born, a low ranch with a woodstove and a clothesline that has held up through eleven Maine winters better than either of us expected.
She met me in the driveway before I had the car in park. She did not say a word about Franklin. She wrapped both arms around me over the open car door, in front of God and the whole street, and let me shake against her shoulder for as long as I needed to, which turned out to be a long time.
Her spare room still holds our father’s old recliner, the one covered in a plaid so faded you can barely name the original color anymore, the one none of us could ever bring ourselves to sell or give away after he passed. I lay awake in that room the first night listening to her furnace click on and off, forty two years old, sleeping under my sister’s roof like a teenager who had missed curfew, except there was no curfew to have missed. There was just a locked door on a house that had never, it turned out, been mine to walk back into.
For six days I did not open a single box from the garage. I went to work. I came home to Cecelia’s kitchen. I let her feed me at a table crowded with her boys’ homework and her husband’s church bulletin and a candle that smelled like balsam because it was already October in western Maine and the whole valley smelled like woodsmoke by four in the afternoon.
On the seventh day, mostly to have something to do with my hands that was not crying, I finally went through the last of the boxes Cecelia had let me store in her garage two years earlier, after we cleared out our father’s place. Most of them were things I had been too tired to sort properly the first time. Photographs. A church directory from a parish that had since merged with the one in the next town over. A stack of Christmas cards rubber banded together by year.
And, at the bottom of the last box, the toolbox.