The man on my front step finished his sentence with his face in his hands, and I sat down beside him, because the story of the loose brick turned out to be the story of a boy who spent fifty years misunderstanding the man who saved him.
He had lived in my house from 1968 to 1972, and the night before his family left in a hurry, he was nine years old and frightened and did not understand why they were going. So he did what a nine year old does. He wrote a letter to whoever would live there next, and he hid it behind a loose brick low on the north wall, behind the furnace.
The letter was gone when I found that hollow in 2003. And there was only one other person who ever knew it was there. The man who sold me this house in 1991, who I always understood to be handling an estate. He was not. He was this mans father.
The boy grew up believing his father was a man who did something wrong, who sold a house that was not his and moved his family in the night and never explained, and he carried that shame about his father for fifty years, when the truth behind the loose brick was the exact opposite of what he feared.
We spent the afternoon on it, and then the evening, and between his memories and the papers I still had from the sale, we pieced it together. His father had not been running from the law. He had been running from a violent man in their own family, gathering his children in the dark and driving them a thousand miles to safety, doing the frightening, lonely thing a father does when protecting his children means looking, to everyone else, like the guilty party.
And the letter. His father had found it behind the brick that last night, the boys note to the future, and he had taken it. Not to destroy it. The man learned that evening, when he finally called his elderly aunt to ask, that his father had kept that letter his whole life, folded in his wallet, a boys hopeful words to a stranger, carried by a father who could not tell his son the truth but could not bear to leave the note behind either.
His father had passed years ago, still misunderstood. But the aunt had the wallet, and the letter was still in it.
She mailed it to him. Fifty-three years after he hid it behind my furnace, a man in his sixties read his own nine year old handwriting, carried all that time by the father he had wrongly been ashamed of.
He came back to thank me. I told him I had done nothing but own a house with a loose brick in it. He said the brick had given him his father back, and that was everything.