Part 3 — The Storage Unit
Glenn stood up so fast that his chair hit the carpet, and then he stood there with his hands open, not knowing where to put them.
Kendra read the last line again, slowly, so that nobody could miss it.
“The lock code is the date your parents were married. June fourteenth.”
I covered my mouth. Harold and I had been married on a Saturday in 1983, and Curtis had remembered the date even when he could not remember where he slept.
Bethany said, in a thin voice, that this was all very touching. But my son Glenn turned and looked at his wife with an expression I had never seen on him in thirty-nine years.
“Bethany. Not tonight.”
Curtis was still standing in the doorway with his cap in his hand. He said he had come to see if I was all right, and to tell his brother he did not want money for the lawyer.
“I want a public defender, Mama, and I want to go to drug court. I asked for it myself. If I do the program, I do not go to prison.”
I had not known that was possible. Kendra explained that Hamilton County has a drug court, and that when the judge is told the family wishes to see the program completed, the judge listens. She said Curtis had asked for it weeks ago, and he had already been accepted pending the hearing.
Dalton went to the door and took Curtis by the hand. He said, “Uncle Curtis, can I see the toolbox?”
We drove in a convoy, the four of us, down Brainerd Road to a long row of orange doors. Curtis knelt by number forty-one. He dialed zero six one four, and the lock clicked open.
The red chest sat in the middle of the floor, swept clean. Beside it was my lawn mower, drained of gas and covered with a tarp.
He had stolen the checks and the mower, but he had kept his fathers chest the way you keep a candle lit.
In the top tray lay a note in Harolds old pencil, which Curtis had never shown anyone. “Light stays on. H.”
Glenn reached into his pocket and took out his checkbook. Without a word he wrote out a check for the legal retainer, and then another for four thousand two hundred sixty dollars, the amount of my stolen benefits, which I would repay to the Social Security office myself in a letter explaining that my son was in treatment.
Bethany stayed home that night. In the spring she came to dinner and brought a lemon cake. We did not discuss it, and she ate quietly.
Curtis finished the first ninety days in December. The judge shook his hand.
That night I left the porch light on, as I always had, and for the first time in years, I watched my son walk up the steps under it.