I worked the stitching loose, and the moment I saw what Gene had hidden inside it, I had to sit down on the bed, because it was a key. Flat, brass, a number stamped into the head of it. 214.
Folded around it, thin as a leaf, was a deposit slip from Farmers State with a box rental written on the back in his pencil, and a date in March, and my name — mine alone — on the signature line.
I was at that bank at nine the next morning in yesterday’s clothes. The woman took me back and turned her key and left me in a little room with a door that closes, which I did not know they had.
Inside that box was my mother’s charm bracelet.
I have to explain what that means. In February of 1991 somebody came in our back door while we were at a funeral in Anderson and took the television, a shotgun, and my mother’s jewelry box, and my mother had been dead nine months. That bracelet had eleven charms on it, one for every grandbaby and one little silver sewing machine, and the deputy took the report and told us straight out we would never see any of it again, and he was right for twenty-seven years.
Under the bracelet in that box was the rest of it. A photocopy of that 1991 sheriff’s report, the itemized list, my daddy’s signature at the bottom. An auction house invoice out of Kokomo dated the ninth of March, lot 411, estate jewelry, four hundred and twenty dollars. And a printout of an online listing, dated back in November, with the picture circled in ink.
He had been watching estate auctions. For years, is what I think, though he never said a word about it. This man who could not remember our anniversary without me leaving the calendar open on the counter had been scrolling through auction listings looking for eleven charms and a silver sewing machine, and when he found it he drove to Kokomo on a Saturday he told me was a parts run.
The note was under the invoice, on the back of a feed store receipt.
I couldn’t get you a bracelet. Anybody can buy a bracelet. It took me nine years to get you THIS one, and I put my initials on that keychain so you’d carry it and not lose it, and so someday when you finally opened it you’d know exactly who to be mad at. Keep it on you. — G.
Nine years. He had been looking since 2016.
I got a keychain with the wrong initials and I set it in the nightstand drawer where he could see me do it, and I let my face say the rest. He never explained himself. Two weeks later he was gone in the recliner with the news on, and I spent eleven months thinking my husband’s last gift to me was five dollars of tooled leather from the hardware store.
I wear the bracelet on Sundays and at every funeral. The keychain is on my keys, and Gene’s initials are worn smooth now from my thumb, and I carry that man everywhere I go, exactly like he told me to.