The Chest My Daughter Carried Home

Dannick said, “She called me that first. She called me before she did anything. She said, ‘Dannick, what’s something like that worth?’ And I said, ‘Renata, don’t you do it, you tell me what you need and I’ll find it.’ And she said, ‘I can’t ask my mother for it, Dannick. I can’t. I told her I’d done fine on my own.'”

I sat down on the drop-cloth-covered bench because my knees would not hold me.

He said, “She sold it to a dealer at a flea market for three hundred and ten dollars. She told me that she cried so hard in the parking lot a woman from a church booth brought her a coffee.

She went home and paid the hospital with the money. And the next morning she called me again and said, ‘I have just done the one thing she told me never to do.'”

I thought about the way I had said it. Then take it. See how it sits in a room full of cardboard.

I heard myself say, “She could have called me.”

Dannick looked at me for a long moment. He is not a cruel man. He said, “Ottilie, what do you think you’d have said?”

I could not answer him. I knew exactly what I would have said. I would have said, I told you so, not in those words, but in a long, patient, wounded silence on the other end of a phone line. She had known me for thirty years.

That, Dannick told me, was why she did not call my house in all the years after. It was not that she was angry. It was that she had become, in her own mind, exactly the thing I had accused her of being, and she could not stand to hear me be right.

“She decided,” Dannick said, “that she’d fix it first and then she’d call. She said, ‘When I can put it on her floor, I’ll tell her. Not before.'”

So she started looking.

The dealer from the flea market had sold the chest within a month, to another dealer in Dubuque, who sold it to an antique mall in Menomonie, Wisconsin.

Dannick told me this the way a man reads out a road map, one turn at a time.

It took him a year to learn it had gone to a collector named Alden Kvam, a retired man with a big house outside Eau Claire who collected what he called “Scandinavian and German folk pieces.”

I said, “Kvam? He bought it?”

“Bought it,” Dannick said, “and had it painted.”

I closed my eyes.

“White,” Dannick said. “A chalk paint. He wanted it to look ‘farmhouse.’ He had a man brush a coat of clear shellac over the old tulips first, to seal them, and then paint right over the top. He told me on the phone he’d put thirty hours into it.”

I made a sound I had not made since the hospital.

Dannick said, “Renata drove over to Eau Claire the first time. Anders in the back seat in his booster. She stood on that man’s porch and offered him four hundred dollars for the chest and he laughed at her. She went back every year.

Sixth time, he told her to stop coming. She wrote him a letter every month after that, and sent a picture of the boy with every one.”

I said, “Where did she get the money?”

Dannick took off his hat and looked into it. He said, “She cleaned offices. Night shift, a medical building, five nights a week. And she sold her own things, Ottilie. The kitchen table she’d bought. Her good china.