Every summer, Aunt Deborah hosts what she calls the “rooftop cookout.” Same setup every year – her in a yellow windbreaker with a can of Coors in hand, leaning against the AC unit, telling us about her latest job interview disaster or the downstairs neighbor’s stolen package.
But no one ever goes inside.
Not once, in all these years.
If you need to use the bathroom? “There’s a gas station on the corner, honey.”
Need more napkins? “I’ll get them – just stay here.”
Even when it started raining last August, she dragged a folding table under the overhang before she ever touched the door behind her.
We used to joke about it. Called her place the “Locked Box.”
Until last summer.
The Setup We’d Stopped Questioning
I should tell you about Deborah.
She’s my dad’s older sister by four years. Sixty-one. Never married, or at least not that anyone talks about. She’s been in that apartment on Terrace Street since before I was born – third floor, corner unit, faces east. She always says she likes the morning light. We’ve never seen the morning light from inside.
She’s not a weird person, if that’s where your head is going. She’s funny. Sharp. She does the crossword in pen. She remembers everyone’s birthday without writing it down and sends actual cards, not texts, with a ten-dollar bill tucked inside even when you’re thirty-two years old and she definitely can’t afford it.
She worked in medical billing for twenty-two years before the company shifted everything to a contractor in Ohio and gave her a severance that lasted eight months. Since then it’s been temp work, mostly. Data entry, some reception. She mentions the interviews the way other people mention weather. Just a thing that happens, mostly bad, not worth getting too upset about.
She is not a dramatic person.
Which is part of why no one ever pushed on the apartment thing. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just Deborah.
You’d ask to use the bathroom and she’d wave you toward the stairwell. “Gas station’s closer than you think.” Said it so easily, no edge to it, that you’d actually go. Then you’d be standing in a BP bathroom on the corner of Terrace and Ninth and you’d think, wait, how did that just happen?
My cousin Marcy called it the redirect. Said Deborah had a gift for it. “She doesn’t say no. She just makes you do something else.”
Marcy’s a therapist, so she notices that stuff.
The rest of us just went to the gas station.
Last July
It was hotter than it should have been for 6pm. I’d driven up from Philly, four hours in a car with busted AC, and I was already damp and irritable when I got to the roof. My dad was there, and my uncle Pete, and Marcy with her husband Greg who I can never think of anything to say to. Deborah had the grill going and there were flies and a plastic tablecloth held down with a brick at each corner and it was, genuinely, a good time.
The thing about Deborah’s cookouts is that she works harder than anyone. She carries everything up herself. Coolers, folding chairs, the actual grill. She does not accept help. “I’ve got a system,” she says, which means: don’t come inside.
Around eight, the food was gone and Pete had gotten into the bourbon he’d brought and was telling a long story about a boat. My dad was half-listening. Marcy and Greg had wandered to the far edge of the roof to look at something, the skyline maybe. I was just sitting there, a little drunk, watching Deborah scrape the grill.
Then her phone rang.
She looked at the screen and her face did something. Not alarm exactly. More like: not now.
“I have to take this,” she said, and she stepped through the roof door into the stairwell.
That was it. That was the whole gap.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I genuinely don’t have a good explanation. I needed to throw away a paper plate, I think. There was no trash can on the roof. I’d been holding the plate for ten minutes. I pushed through the roof door.
The Hallway
The stairwell smelled like old carpet and radiator heat. I could hear Deborah one floor down, her voice low and even. I wasn’t trying to hear her. I was looking for a trash can.
There wasn’t one in the stairwell.
Her apartment door was at the end of the hall. Third floor, corner unit. I’d been in this building dozens of times and never past the stairwell. The door was – and this is the part that gets me – just slightly open. Not much. An inch. Maybe less.
I didn’t go in. I want to be clear about that. I stood at the door and knocked, even though there was no reason to knock on an open door. The knock pushed it open another few inches.
I saw the edge of a kitchen counter. A dish drying rack. A yellow Post-it on the fridge. Normal things.
I pushed the door open.
What I Expected
Hoarding. That’s what I expected.
I think that’s what everyone had quietly assumed for years. Towers of newspaper. Cat smell, though she doesn’t have a cat. Boxes stacked to the ceiling. Some version of the shows my mom watched on A&E where people’s houses had become their problems.
The apartment was clean.
Not just clean. It was almost bare. The kitchen was small and orderly. The living room had a couch, a lamp, a TV on a stand. Books in a low shelf. Nothing on the walls except one framed photograph I couldn’t see clearly from the doorway.
I took two steps in. I know. I know I shouldn’t have.
The photograph was Deborah and a man I didn’t recognize, standing in front of what looked like a lake. She was younger, maybe forty. She was laughing. He had his arm around her and he was laughing too. He was tall and a little heavy and he had on a green flannel shirt and he looked like someone who laughed a lot.
I stood there longer than I should have.
Then I saw the closet.
The Door
It was just off the living room, the kind of shallow closet that apartments like this always have, meant for coats. The door was open about a foot, and what I saw inside wasn’t coats.
Paintings.
Stacked against each other, edge to edge, filling the closet from floor to ceiling. Some framed, some not. Canvases, thick with paint. I could see the edges of them, the color bleeding around the frames. Deep reds. Blues that were almost black. I couldn’t see the images clearly but there were dozens of them. More than the closet should have been able to hold.
On the inside of the closet door, stuck with a piece of masking tape, was a small piece of paper. Handwritten. It said: keep going.
I heard her on the stairs.
I turned around, walked back through the kitchen, and was three steps into the hallway pulling the door mostly shut behind me when she came up the last step and saw me.
She stopped.
We looked at each other.
“I was looking for the trash,” I said.
She looked at the paper plate in my hand. Then back at me.
“Come on,” she said. “There’s a can by the stairs.”
What She Told Me
She didn’t say anything else that night. Neither did I. We went back up to the roof and Pete finished his boat story and Greg and Marcy left first and then my dad and Pete, and then it was just me and Deborah with the cooling grill and the city going dark below us.
I almost left without saying anything.
“How long have you been painting?” I said.
She was folding a lawn chair. She stopped folding it but she didn’t turn around.
“Since Carl,” she said.
Carl was the man in the photograph. I didn’t know who Carl was. I said so.
She turned around then and sat down on the unfolded chair and looked at me for a second like she was deciding something.
Carl, she said, was someone she’d been with for six years. This was back in the early 2000s. They’d met at a work conference in Cleveland of all places. He was from Minnesota. He came to New York. They had the apartment together for three years.
He died in 2004. Aneurysm. He was forty-four years old.
She said it the way she says everything. Level. Factual. Not performing anything.
After he died, she said, she couldn’t be in the apartment. She took a leave from work and spent three weeks at her friend Gail’s place in Hoboken. Then she came back and she didn’t know what to do with herself and she bought a canvas at the drugstore, the cheap kind, and some acrylic paint, and she painted something.
She didn’t say what she painted.
She kept painting. Nights, mostly. Weekends. She wasn’t good at it at first. She said this plainly, without self-pity. “I was terrible. The first two years were terrible.”
But she kept going.
Twenty years of paintings in that closet. Some in the closet, some under the bed, some stacked along the wall behind the couch. She’d never shown them to anyone. Never tried to. She didn’t go to classes or join groups or post them anywhere. She just painted them and put them away.
“Why?” I said.
She thought about it.
“Because it’s the one thing that’s just mine,” she said.
I didn’t say anything to that.
“Carl used to say I gave everything away,” she said. “That I’d give you the coat off my back and then wonder why I was cold.” She almost smiled. “He wasn’t wrong.”
She picked up the lawn chair again and finished folding it.
“The paintings are just mine,” she said again. “I’m not ready to share them.”
After
I drove back to Philly the next morning. I’ve thought about that closet probably more than makes sense. All those canvases stacked edge to edge. Twenty years of nights. The note on the inside of the door in her own handwriting: keep going.
Marcy asked me once, a few months later, if I’d ever figured out what Deborah was hiding in there.
“Nothing,” I said. “She’s not hiding anything.”
Marcy gave me her therapist look.
“She’s keeping something,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
This past summer she had the cookout again. Yellow windbreaker. Coors. The folding table with the brick on each corner. She told us about an interview that went sideways when the interviewer asked her to rate her proficiency in a software that hadn’t existed since 2011.
I used the gas station bathroom.
Some things you don’t need to change.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it along to someone who’d get it.
For more tales of unexpected revelations, check out My Kids Were Asleep in the Minivan. I Woke Up to Someone Breathing Outside My Window., or read about a different kind of surprise when The Manager Walked Out of the Back and Came Straight to My Table. And for a truly wild family secret, you won’t want to miss My Sister Just Named Her Baby After Our Missing Brother – She Had No Idea He Existed.
