Part 3 — Under the Drawer
The second slip was folded inside the first, and it fell out onto the birthday buffet next to the cake.
“Anton, the account number is taped under the top drawer of the bench. The bench has a false bottom for the drawer. Pull it all the way out.”
Nick laughed, but there was no air in it. He said the bench was long gone.
It was not. Stan from the transfer station had phoned me three days earlier to say that a workbench that good, built with dovetails and a maple top, did not belong in a pile of scrap. He had pulled it into his own garage and covered it with a tarp, just in case somebody came asking.
Lenny drove me out that afternoon in his pickup. Stan was waiting at the gate, and he helped us lift the bench into the truck bed with a strap and a groan.
I carried it into our shed. The empty screw holes in the floor lined up like old friends. I sat down on the stool, pulled out the top drawer, and felt along the underside.
There it was, a manila envelope taped flat, marked in her carpenter pencil. “Anton. The real one.”
Inside was a confirmation letter from the credit union in Albany. It listed a rollover IRA with a single beneficiary, Anton, and an account number of twelve digits. The balance was a hundred eighty-six thousand dollars and some change.
Rose had measured twice, as she always told me to, and she had put the answer under a drawer where no one but a carpenter would think to look.
The credit union manager, a woman named Ms. Pellegrino, confirmed everything by telephone and said that the old account Nick had been reading from had been closed in June. The money he had drawn out, forty-one thousand dollars, came from a joint checking account that Rose and I had left open for household bills.
It was my money too, in every way that counted. Nick had no right to a dime of it.
He came to the shed on Sunday morning without the van, without the chain of keys, and without his usual grin. He brought the checkbook, her IRA statements, and a cashiers check for the full forty-one thousand dollars.
He had taken a second mortgage on his own house to cover it. He said he could not bear to let the shed fill up with strangers asking where the money was.
I told him the mortgage was his own business, and I was sorry for the trouble it caused him. Then I did something that surprised us both. I handed him a chisel.
Rose had refinished furniture for the whole street, and there were nine pieces still in the back of the shed waiting for her. Nick and I worked on them every Saturday through the fall, sanding, staining, penciling her name and the date on the bottom of each one.
The last piece went to Lenny. On the bottom, Nick wrote a line of his own, in small awkward letters.
“Rose, with love.”