The Chest My Daughter Carried Home

She came on the ninth day.

She stood in the doorway of his room in a gray coat, with her car keys still in her hand, and she was thinner than I remembered. She walked straight to his bed and put her head down next to his hand, and he opened his eyes. He said, “There she is.” That was the last full sentence I heard him say.

Ebbe died on the eleventh day, at four in the morning, with the two of us on either side of the bed and a wall of silence between us as wide as the bed was long.

She came to the funeral. She sat in the last pew of the Lutheran church with her coat on.

At the lunch afterward, in the basement, over ham sandwiches and three kinds of bars, I saw Odessa, Ebbe’s sister, go to her at the coffee urn and say something low. I saw Renata set down her cup as if it were made of glass.

I saw her walk up the basement stairs.

I did not follow her.

That night I asked Odessa what she had said to Renata at the coffee urn.

Odessa said, “Only what he asked me to say. I asked if she had brought the chest home like Ebbe wanted.” And then Odessa looked at my face and said, “Ottilie, she doesn’t have it, does she?”

I said, “She took it. It’s in her apartment.”

Odessa said, “No it isn’t. She went white as a sheet.”

I told her a grown woman could keep a chest where she liked. I went home and worked on the washstand until two in the morning, because the alternative was to sit in my kitchen and know what Odessa had seen.

I knew her number by heart. I dialed the first seven digits of it more than once in the years after that.

Once I got all ten in, and my thumb was on the green button, and the kitchen clock ticked, and I thought, what is the first sentence?

Every first sentence I could think of started with “I” and ended in a plea for her to forgive me, and I could not stand to be a woman who asked for that. So I put the phone down and went to the shop.

That was the pattern for years. I was not too busy and I was not heartbroken in a way that kept me from the phone. I was proud. Pride is a very efficient tradesman. It works all night and does not take breaks, and it will build you a whole life out of excuses, all of them true and none of them load-bearing.

Through all of those years, Dannick came by, and in the last five of them he had something on his mind.

Dannick is the picker. A picker is a man who drives around buying old things from places that don’t know what they have, and selling them to places that do.

He is a big, quiet, round-shouldered man about my age, with a trailer hitch that has never once been empty, and he has been bringing me work for thirty years. Ebbe used to say Dannick could find a good piece of oak in a snowbank.

Every spring, on a Friday, when the thaw came and the road dried out, he stood just inside the shop door and asked me the same question in the same flat voice.

“You hear from Renata?”