The Chest My Daughter Carried Home

And every spring I said, “No.”

And he would nod, look at the floor, and say, “Well,” and then talk about the weather. And one spring he did not nod. He just stood there for a moment with a look I took for sympathy, and then he said, “Ottilie, I’d call her if I were you.”

A man stood in my shop for five springs asking me the same question, and I never once asked him why a picker cared so much about the state of my family. That is the kind of blind you can only be when you are completely occupied with yourself.

This was the eighth year.

On the morning of the Thursday before Thanksgiving I started the last coat on the rocker, the little cane-seat rocker Renata’s feet barely reached the floor from when she was four. I had saved it for last because I knew what it was. After it, there was nothing left to fix that I could call a reason not to pick up the phone.

I finished at ten past two. I set the brush on the can. I looked at the gap at the foot of the bed.

I said out loud, to nobody, “Monday.”

Then I heard Dannick’s truck.

Dannick’s flatbed was parked sideways in the lot with a load on the back under a gray moving blanket, tied down with yellow straps. And Dannick himself was standing at the bottom of the shop steps in the snow, turning his truck keys over and over in one fist, snow settling on his shoulders, and he did not come up.

I said, “Dannick, you’ll catch your death. Come in.”

He said, “Ottilie, I have to tell you something first. And I need you to let me finish.”

He said, “Someone’s been calling me for five years.”

I said, “Who?”

And he looked past me, at the bare gap in the back of the shop, as though he could see it from there, and he said, “Every other Sunday, Ottilie. Every other Sunday for five years, a woman has called me and said the same thing. She says, ‘Dannick, did you hear anything.'”

I said, “Dannick.”

He said, “It was Renata.”

He told it to me standing in the snow, and then, when he saw my face, inside by the stove on an upturned crate, with the door open the whole time because he said he could not stand to have it shut.

In her third winter in Sioux Falls, Renata’s marriage came apart. I had not even known she had married. She had married a man named Corbin Haas in a courthouse, eleven months after she left, and had not told us.

By the time she had a baby, a boy, Anders, Corbin was already halfway out the door. When Anders was not yet two Corbin took the truck and the savings account and went to Texas, and she found out from a bank teller.

The chain she worked for downsized its Sioux Falls floor that same winter, and she was laid off in January. Anders got pneumonia in February, the kind that puts a toddler under a plastic tent for nine days.

In March she was looking at a hospital balance of three hundred and ten dollars after insurance, on top of rent she was a month behind on, and a landlord who had stopped being patient.

She had two hundred dollars in the bank.

She also had a dower chest in the corner of her apartment.