Around 2 a.m., I woke up because somebody was dragging something across the concrete outside the house.
At first I thought maybe a trash can tipped over in the wind. Then I heard my mother’s back door open.
I looked through the kitchen window and saw her outside in my dad’s old work gloves carrying a shovel toward the detached garage.
That woman was seventy-four years old and barely weighed a hundred pounds. Seeing her digging in the middle of the night honestly scared me more than anything she’d said earlier.
I followed her outside and asked what she was doing.
She immediately told me to go back inside.
Instead I turned on the garage light.
There was already a hole dug halfway through the dirt floor near my father’s old tool bench. Fresh dirt piled beside it. My mother looked furious when the light came on, like I’d interrupted something important.
Then she finally said, “Your father lied about what happened to Raymond.”
Raymond was my uncle. Dad’s younger brother. Supposedly died drunk driving in New Mexico back in 1987. Closed casket funeral. I was little but I remember everybody whispering about it for years.
My mother started digging again while she talked.
According to her, my father got a call three weeks ago from someone claiming Raymond was alive and living outside Albuquerque under another name. My mother thought it was a scam at first until my father’s old military footlocker disappeared from the garage the same week.
That’s why she disappeared for days. She drove to New Mexico herself after finding motel receipts hidden in my father’s old Bible.
I asked what any of this had to do with digging up the garage floor.
That’s when she climbed out of the hole and handed me a rusted metal cash box covered in dirt.
Inside were stacks of old letters tied with electrical wire and a Polaroid of my father standing beside a man who looked exactly like my uncle Raymond dated “Amarillo — October 2008.”