I drove to the storage place the same afternoon because once something gets stuck in my head lately, I can’t sleep until I deal with it. The manager was a college kid eating barbecue chips behind the desk. He barely looked up when I gave him the receipt.
Unit 214 was mostly old furniture covered in plastic sheets and boxes from houses we lived in during the eighties. I almost left thinking my husband had hidden paperwork there during chemo and forgotten about it.
Then I found a small metal lockbox taped underneath an end table.
Inside was a birth certificate for a girl named Ava Collins.
Same birth date as my son Michael.
Same hospital too.
Father section blank.
There was also an envelope full of money order receipts stretching back almost nineteen years, all mailed to the same woman in Missouri. Some months were fifty dollars. Some were eight hundred. One note in my husband’s handwriting said, “Karen can never know Michael met her already.”
That part made me sit down right there on the concrete floor because about ten years ago, Michael spent one summer hauling scrap metal with his dad across Missouri and Kansas.
When I got home, my son’s truck was already in my driveway.
He asked if I’d opened the unit.
I said yes.
Then he looked me dead in the face and asked if the little girl in the photo still had the same eyes as him.