The lawyer’s office on Iron Avenue smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet, and that is the smell I will remember for the rest of my life, because that is where I learned that box 214 was empty. Two days. That is all the time my stepmother Corva needed. When I asked her, right there in front of the attorney’s rolltop desk, why she had driven to Union Trust without telling one living soul, she folded her hands the way she folds them in the third pew at church and said, “There was nothing in there that concerned you.”
I am forty one years old. I live eleven miles from the house I grew up in, on the county road my father graveled himself the summer I turned nine. My father, Prosper, had been dead sixteen days.
I want to tell you what was supposed to be in that box, because it matters. It matters more than the money, though there was money too. It was my mother’s wedding ring, a small solitaire she wore for twenty six years before the cancer took her. It was forty three letters my mother wrote my father during the two winters he worked the wheat harvest crews up through Nebraska and the Dakotas before they were married, letters he kept bundled in a rubber band gone brittle as a cracker. It was a felt roll of thirty two silver dollars my father’s own father had carried home from a bank failure in 1933, back when a man learned not to trust paper. And it was six hundred dollars in cash, folded twice, that my father called his coffin money, because he did not want his children paying for his funeral out of their own pockets.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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