Part 3 — The Real Safe
The tape hissed, turned over, and Aurelios voice came back slower, as if he had set down his coffee and leaned in.
“The real safe is behind the garage wall, Mina, behind the shelf with the paint cans. I put it in myself the summer you won the flower show.”
“The combination is the day you sold me my first rose. June fourteenth, 1971.”
Yolanda the realtor, still holding the sign she had pulled off her clipboard, gently suggested to the two couples that they might wish to come back another day. They left quietly.
Ximena stood at the sink with her back to the room. Her shoulders were stiff, and then they were not.
We drove together to the old house in her car, which she insisted on, and neither of us said a word. The garage smelled like oil and cedar.
Behind the paint cans, inside a plywood panel I would never have noticed, was a steel door the size of a bread box. I turned the dial to six, fourteen, seventy-one, and it clicked open.
There was the recorded agreement, an extra copy for safekeeping. There were three gold coins in a velvet bag, a stack of savings certificates, and a framed photograph of the two of us at the plaza, forty years younger, with roses in my arms.
Beneath them lay two envelopes. One said “Mina.” The other said “Ximena, mi hija.”
I watched my stepdaughter open her letter in the garage where she had learned to ride a bicycle, and I saw her face change as she read.
She handed it to me without a word. “Ximena, the guitar is yours, and the truck, and the little safe with the four hundred dollars. I wanted you to have something to hold while your sorrow settled. But the house is Minas, and the heart of this family is hers, and she is also yours. Please let her be your mother, even now.”
Ximena was crying so hard she had to sit down on an overturned bucket. She said she had been terrified of being forgotten, and she had decided that if her father left her nothing, she would take everything.
I knelt down beside her on the oily floor and told her that she had never been forgotten for one second of her life.
She brought back the radio on Sunday, carried it up the porch steps like a baby. She plugged it in beside the couch where Aurelio had slept for fifty years.
We put the second side of the tape in, and the boleros came out low, soft as a blanket.
“Mina,” his voice said, “the radio and I waited up for you.”
And this time, my daughter was there waiting too.