I unwrapped the handkerchief in my lap, and inside was a photograph. Small and square with the little scalloped white edge they used to print, soft at the corners from handling. It was a picture of a little girl, maybe six years old, sitting at a rolltop desk with a pencil in her fist, looking up at whoever held the camera. And I knew that little girl. I knew the dress, and I knew the room, and I knew the desk. The little girl was me.
For a long minute I could not make the world hold still. This desk came from an estate sale two counties over, from a family I never met, forty dollars off a folding table in a stranger front yard. There was no way on this earth a picture of me at six belonged tucked in its secret drawer. My husband found me on the floor with my hand over my mouth and thought something had gone wrong with my heart.
Then I turned the photograph over, and in pencil gone gray with age was my grandfather handwriting. Three words. My girl, homework. He had written the date under it. And I understood, sitting there on the floor, what I was holding.
It was his desk. The very one. When he passed it went to my uncle, and my uncle family sold off his things years back after he passed too, and the desk had wandered through sale after sale, county to county, until it came to rest on a folding table where I could not walk by it. I had not bought a desk like my grandfather. I had bought his, the one I did my homework at, the one where he showed me the secret drawer, and never in my life did I know it.
He had taken that photograph of me and hidden it in the one place he taught me to find, the place a man keeps his important things. He must have meant for me to have the desk. It went the wrong way when he died, to the uncle instead of to me, and this little picture rode along in the dark of that drawer for all these years, waiting.
I sat on the floor and cried like the little girl in the photo. My husband stopped groaning about where to put it. He got down on the floor beside me and looked at that picture a long time, and then he said we would find a wall for that desk if he had to build one.
It sits in our front room now, and every so often I roll the top up and down just to hear that clatter, and I feel like my grandfather is close again. He kept his most important thing where he knew I would look. It turned out his most important thing was me.