I laid the two brass keys side by side on the green felt of the table in the small viewing room at Agate Bay Savings, the one of mine with its faded red shoelace and the one of Nils with the same lace and the same double knot, and for a long moment neither of us touched them. The clerk had gone to fetch the guard box. Through the glass I could see the lake, flat and pewter under the March sky, and an ore boat slipping out of the harbor with its horn sounding.
“Mom,” Nils said, in a voice I had not heard since he was a boy of eight, “the lady at the desk told me the rule. Each key opens its own box. Forty one is yours, and seventy seven is mine. But the rule also says that if both lessees are present, with identification, we may open them together.” He looked at the carpet. “I came to ask if we could do that. I have been standing at the brochure rack for an hour trying to get up the nerve.”
I looked at my son, forty seven years old, with the long jaw of his father, and I saw a man who had not slept in a week. I put my hand on his sleeve. “Nils,” I said, “you have never needed nerve to ask me for anything. You only ever needed it to ask politely.” He gave a short laugh that was almost a sob. “I was wrong, Mom,” he said. “About the key. About all of it. I did not understand that the box was not an estate matter. It was a promise.”
We signed the register together, one under the other, and the clerk brought out two long gray boxes and left us alone with a lamp. I opened mine first, with my red lace key. It held what I expected. The marriage license, yellowed. The deed to the house. A thin envelope of savings bonds. The will of Aarne, which named Nils executor and me the sole beneficiary, in plain language. Nils, reading over my shoulder, drew a long breath. “That is exactly what he told me,” he said. “He never wanted me to take anything.”
A man who loves two people quietly will sometimes set a bolt between them, only so they must open it together.
Then we turned to the second box. Nils fitted his key into the keyhole with fingers that trembled. The little door opened with a click. Inside lay a single large envelope, thick as a Bible, tied with a piece of kitchen string, and a smaller one on top of it. The smaller one was addressed in the slow, careful hand of my husband. For Signe and Nils, to be opened together, at the Agate Bay Savings, on a day when they are both sitting down. I looked at my son. He looked at me. We sat.
Nils slit the flap with his thumbnail and unfolded the single sheet. It was written in pencil. He cleared his throat and began to read, and I closed my eyes. “My dear Signe, my dear boy. If you are reading this, I have gone to shovel a walk in the sky. Do not be sad. I have left you something that I could not give while I was alive, because I am a stubborn man and I wanted to give it with my own hands. The big envelope is a deed. In 2009 I bought a piece of shoreline on the north shore.”
I opened my eyes. “Four acres,” Nils read, “with a one room cabin, on a point of rock above the lake, at Gooseberry. I paid forty one thousand dollars from the overtime I saved over twenty years. I put it in both your names, jointly, with right of survivorship, so that neither of you could sell it without the other. I did that on purpose. You are the two people I love most in the world. I want you to have to talk.” He stopped. His voice cracked. He went on. “Signe, I know you hate the cold. But sit on the porch in July.”
We drove up the shore that Saturday in my old Buick, with Marit in the back and a thermos of coffee. The road wound along the lake through the birches, with the ice breaking up in long gray plates. The cabin stood on a spit of black rock, small and square, with a green door and a stovepipe and a little porch facing east. Someone had left a rocking chair on it. The key hung on a nail under the eave, tagged in the pencil of Aarne. Open. I turned it myself, and the door swung inward on the smell of cedar.
Inside, it was swept clean. A woodstove. A table with two chairs. A kettle on the hook, and on the shelf a row of jars. In one of them were thirty one hand tied flies, and in another a set of pencils, sharpened. On the wall, written in a square hand with a carpenter pencil on the pine boards, was a single line. This is for the two of you. I sat down on the nearest chair, and Nils on the other, and neither of us said a thing. The stove ticked as it cooled. The lake lay down below us, vast and blue.
We stayed the weekend. Marit made a pot of soup. Nils built a fire in the stove and burned his thumb and cursed in Finnish, a word he did not know he knew. I sat in the rocking chair in my good wool coat on the porch in the March sun and watched the ore boats go by on the edge of the horizon. In the evening, Nils came out and sat on the step beside me. After a long while, he said, “Mom, would you like me to teach you how to fish?” I said I would rather he asked his father.
He laughed. He put his arm round my shoulders, and I let my head lie against his coat. We stayed that way until the stars came out, and the sky over the lake was a bowl of cold light. Then he said, in the voice of a boy of eight, “I am sorry I said hand it over.” I said that all was forgiven. I said that what he had really been asking was to be let in. And I said, with a lump in my throat, that the door had been open all along.
We go up every second Sunday now, the three of us and sometimes the grandchildren. The two brass keys hang side by side on a nail inside the green door, each on its red shoelace. In summer I sit on the porch with my crossword, in pen, and Nils sits on the step with his rod, and the lake does what it has always done. When people ask who owns the cabin, I tell them that it belongs to a pair of fools who were taught by the best one how to share.