When they wheeled my father out of the back bedroom, a brass key still hung on a BOOTLACE at his throat.
The hospice aide cut it loose and put it in my palm by the mailbox.
“He said this goes to the one who reads the mail,” she said. “Not the other one.”
The paper tag on it said DOWNSTAIRS in his square capitals.
I read deeds for the county. I’d spent eleven months on his couch so the night nurse could go home.
My savings went too. Copays, the rented bed, a water heater.
My brother Craig flew in for the funeral and stayed for the kitchen table.
“The will leaves the house to me,” he said. “You’re not on it.”
He and Kim had a realtor and an open house booked for that weekend.
I told him I had forty-one dollars in checking.
“That’s not a reason to move anything,” he said. “Don’t make this ugly.”
I smiled at him. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll bring the coffee.”
The key fit nothing upstairs. Not his rolltop, not the gun cabinet, not the tackle box.
The second desk was behind the water heater under a painter’s tarp, a twin of the rolltop, with an older brass lock.
It turned on the first try.
Inside was one envelope with my name in his hand, a second page folded behind it, and a lawyer’s card on the flap.
I read the letter on the basement steps and left the second page folded. Then I dialed the lawyer.
His weekend fee to drive over from Mattoon was four hundred and fifty dollars. I paid it out of the coffee can I’d been filling for the headstone.
I didn’t tell Craig. I made the coffee.
That weekend the house looked exactly how Kim wanted it.
Candles going, lemon bars on our mother’s good plates, the realtor’s shoes squeaking on the linoleum, thirty people from the plant in his rooms.
Craig kept telling people our father wanted it sold fast.
At two o’clock the doorbell went. Craig pointed at me. “You’re the help today. Get that.”
“Not this one,” I said. “This one I PAID FOR MYSELF.”
He opened it himself, on a gray-haired man holding a leather folder, my father’s handwriting showing at the top.
The kitchen went so quiet I heard the realtor’s pen click.
The man lifted his face from the folder, looked past my brother to me, and drew a breath.
Leonard Szabo on the Porch
“Afternoon,” he said. “I’m Leonard Szabo. I practice in Mattoon.”
He had the folder in both hands and didn’t free one to shake.
“Lyle Hendrix hired me last spring. He asked me to come to this house and read one page out loud in the kitchen, with both of his children standing in it. His daughter called and said today, two o’clock.”
Craig laughed. It was the short one he uses on waiters.
“This is an open house,” he said. “Pop’s lawyer is in Tucson. You’ve got the wrong kitchen.”
“Your father’s lawyer in 2011 was in Tucson,” Mr. Szabo said. “This is a different page.”
Nobody from the plant moved. Gene Holt ran the batch line next to my father for twenty-two years. He had a lemon bar halfway to his mouth, and he left it there.
Kim came down the hall with the long candle lighter still in her hand. She looked at the folder, and at Craig, and last at me, standing by the urn with a sleeve of paper cups.
“Who let him in,” she said.
“Craig did,” I said.
Sherry Voigt had stopped in the dining room doorway with her clipboard flat against her blouse. She’d been walking people through since ten, showing them the hardwood under the runners and the new water heater downstairs. She wasn’t showing anybody anything now.
Mr. Szabo wiped his shoes on the mat twice, slowly, the way you do in a house where somebody’s going to mind.
“Is there a table,” he said.
Craig stepped into his way.
“Whatever this is, it can wait until these people go home,” he said.
“He asked for the people too,” Mr. Szabo said. “Whoever was here. His words.”
Craig didn’t move, and Mr. Szabo didn’t either. After a while Craig did.
There was a table. It was the one Craig had put his elbows on four days earlier to tell me what I wasn’t. Kim had covered it with a white cloth and set a bowl of lemons in the middle that nobody was going to eat.
Mr. Szabo pulled out my father’s chair, looked at it, and pushed it back in. He took the one beside it.
He opened the folder. There were two sheets inside. One was typed. The other was in the same square capitals as the tag on the key.
“Before I start,” he said, “your father asked me for one more thing.”
He turned in the chair and found Sherry in the doorway.
“He wanted the realtor in the room.”
Sherry’s pen clicked.
As far as I knew, my father had never laid eyes on Sherry Voigt.
The Bootlace
He started wearing the key the winter before last, around the time the stairs got to be too much for him.
It hung on a brown lace from his old steel-toes, knotted twice at the back of his neck, under his undershirt. When the nurse listened to his chest, she had to lift it aside with one finger.
I asked him once what it opened.
“My business,” he said.
I let it go. I’d been letting things go in that house since I was a girl. Our mother used to say the Hendrix men kept their mouths shut the way other men kept a savings account.
He was eighty-one. I was forty-eight when I moved onto his couch and forty-nine when he died.
I kept my job at the recorder’s office in Charleston through all of it. Deeds, liens, releases, easements nobody remembers granting. I’d go in at seven-thirty, come home by four-thirty and take over from the day aide.
Most afternoons that was Yolanda Birch. She was somewhere past fifty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a laugh you could hear from the driveway. She came three times a week. She called him Mr. Lyle, and he let her, which he had never let anyone do.
Craig called on holidays. He’s four years older than me and has lived in Tucson since he was twenty-five, selling air conditioning to warehouses. Every call was about the heat out there and how he’d come home once things slowed down.
Things slowed down once, that summer. He flew in for two days, took Pop on a long drive out to the reservoir, and flew home. I was at work both days.
Two other things happened that year that I didn’t think about again until I was standing in the basement.
The first was the water heater. The old tank started leaking in the spring, and I paid for the new one with the last real money in my savings. To get the old tank up the stairs, the plumber had to drag something heavy out of his way, something under a paint-spattered tarp.
“What’s under here,” he said.
“Junk,” I said. “His.”
I never lifted the tarp. I had enough of my own to haul up those stairs.
The second was the pharmacy. One afternoon my father said his heart pills had run out. He wanted them from the drugstore out by the highway in Mattoon, not the one in town, because the one in town shorted him once in 1987. It was forty minutes each way. I went.
The girl at the counter looked it up and said the refill had been picked up two days before. By me.
I didn’t remember doing it. I drove home thinking the couch had finally cost me my mind.
When I pulled in, Yolanda was still there, an hour past the end of her shift. There were two coffee cups in the sink, and two saucers.
“Mr. Lyle wanted company,” she said.
I washed that cup and put it in the cupboard and never once asked whose it was.
Sherry Voigt’s Clipboard
Craig’s copy of the 2011 will came out of a zippered bank bag he’d carried on the plane.
He laid it on the kitchen table the morning after the funeral and turned it around so I could read it. I read papers like it for a living. It was three pages, typed, signed and witnessed in Tucson the spring after our mother died, when Pop went out to stay with him for a month.
The house and everything in it went to Craig. There was one line about me. It said I had a secure position with the county and a pension, and would not need looking after.
Craig tapped that line with his finger so I wouldn’t miss it.
“He was thinking of you,” he said. “He knew you’d be fine.”
I had forty-one dollars in checking and a bed rental I was still paying off.
Kim had a tape measure out before the coffee was done. She measured the front window. Then she went into the back bedroom and measured that, standing on the spot where the bed had been.
“You can stay through the first,” she said. “That’s more than fair, with the showing.”
The realtor came the next afternoon to stage. Sherry Voigt, from an office in Charleston, was a small woman in a camel coat with her hair sprayed into a helmet. She rolled Pop’s recliner out to the garage on a furniture dolly she’d brought herself and put runners down the hall. She asked whether the good plates were staying. I said they were our mother’s, and she said perfect, people love a set of dishes.
I carried boxes for her. It was easier than standing in the kitchen with Craig.
Around four she stopped in the door of the back bedroom and looked at the bare carpet.
“It’s so much better getting to see this room,” she said. “When Craig walked me through this summer, your dad was sleeping in here and I couldn’t get past the door. I had to guess at the square footage.”
She wrote something on her clipboard and moved on to the linen closet.
I stood there with a box of his sweaters.
This summer. The two days I was at work.
The next morning I found the listing agreement on the dining room hutch, under Kim’s purse. It was signed by Craig and dated the second of those two days. It was a copy. The original, I figured, was already in Sherry’s office.
I put the purse back on top of it exactly the way it had been.
Craig had brought a realtor through my father’s bedroom while my father was still in the bed.
Behind the Water Heater
I didn’t say anything to Craig. I went down to the basement for the folding chairs Sherry wanted along the living room wall.
The key had been in my jeans pocket since the mailbox, still in the sandwich bag Yolanda put it in. I’d already tried it on everything upstairs. It didn’t even start into any of them.
The folding chairs were leaned against the new water heater. I pulled them out one at a time, and there behind the tank was the tarp.
I stood there holding a chair and heard the plumber. What’s under here.
I lifted the corner.
It was a rolltop, the twin of the one upstairs, oak gone orange with age. It was Pop’s old desk from the shift office at the plant. I remembered it being carried out when they closed that office in the nineties, and I had never once thought about where it went.
The middle drawer had a brass lock, older than anything else on the desk.
The key went in and turned on the first try.
Inside was one envelope, with my name on the front in the cursive he used on checks. A second page was folded behind it. A business card was clipped to the flap: Leonard Szabo, an office on Charleston Avenue in Mattoon.
I sat down on the basement steps. The letter was short.
Dawn. If Craig is doing what I think, don’t argue with him at the table. You never won an argument at that table and neither did your mother. Call Leonard. He has the rest. Have him read the other page in the kitchen with your brother in it, and whoever else is there, and the realtor if she comes back. I heard the plumber ask you what was under the tarp. You said junk. That’s my girl. Don’t read the other page. It isn’t yours to read. It’s his to hear. —Pop
I read it three times. I didn’t unfold the second page.
It was after eight when I called the number on the card. He picked up himself on the second ring.
“This is Leonard.”
I told him who I was.
There was a pause long enough that I thought the call had dropped.
“I’ve had this on my desk since spring,” he said. “I was starting to think nobody was going to call.”
I told him about the open house. He asked what time it started. He said his fee for coming out on a weekend was four hundred and fifty dollars. He was sorry about that, he said, but his office manager would have his hide.
The coffee can sat on the shelf over the washer, a red can with the lid pressed down tight. I’d started filling it the week the hospice nurse told me it wouldn’t be long. It was twenties from each paycheck, some fives, and a few bills Gene Holt had pushed into my hand at the diner. There was six hundred and twenty dollars in it. That was a plain stone and the setting, I’d figured, by spring.
I counted out four hundred and fifty on top of the dryer and put the rest back.
Upstairs, Kim asked if I’d make coffee for forty on the day.
“Okay,” I said.
I set the can back on the shelf. It weighed almost nothing.
Two Sheets on the White Tablecloth
Mr. Szabo read the typed page first.
He read it the way I read a deed out loud to somebody at my counter, every word, without hurrying and without any voice in it. The last will of Lyle Edward Hendrix, of this county. He read the date. It was a date in the spring, and I knew it before he finished saying it.
The pharmacy, forty minutes out and forty back. Two cups in the sink.
He read the house and the lot and everything in the house, to my daughter, Dawn Marie Hendrix, who stayed.
The truck, the boat on its trailer, and the gun cabinet with what was in it went to my son, Craig Allen Hendrix.
The witnesses were Yolanda Birch and Gloria Estes.
Gloria was the hospice nurse who came every evening at six and was gone by seven. She must have come in on her own time that afternoon. I had never known.
Gene Holt had put his lemon bar down on a napkin on the windowsill.
Mr. Szabo set the typed page aside and picked up the one in square capitals.
“He asked me to read this part too,” he said. “These are his words. I’ll read them as he wrote them.”
He cleared his throat once.
“This summer my son brought a woman with a clipboard into my room while I was lying in it. He told her the carpet would have to come up. She told him what the house would bring. He said soon. I was not asleep.”
Sherry Voigt set her clipboard down on the counter by the urn, very carefully, the way you set down something you’re not sure of.
Mr. Szabo read the last line.
“Dawn doesn’t know any of this. Don’t let him say she does.”
He laid the page on top of the other one and folded his hands on the folder.
Kim had taken three steps back into the hall without seeming to decide to.
Craig stood at the head of the table, where he’d stood four days before. He looked at the pages. Then he looked at me.
“Read it again,” he said.
Craig at the Counter
Mr. Szabo didn’t read it again.
“You’re welcome to have your own attorney call me, Mr. Hendrix,” he said, and slid a card across the tablecloth. “I’ll send copies to whoever you like.”
Craig didn’t pick up the card.
“He was on so many pills that summer he called me by his brother’s name,” he said. “You know that. You were the one counting them out.”
I didn’t say anything.
“An aide,” he said. He turned to the room, to Gene and the others by the window, like they were sitting in a jury box. “An aide and a nurse. Two women who got paid by the hour to sit in that room. He’d have signed a pizza menu if one of them held the pen.”
“I was in the room,” Mr. Szabo said. “There was coffee.”
Craig didn’t look at him.
“Eleven months,” he said to me. “Eleven months on that couch. You think I don’t know what that was? You moved in and you worked on him every day. You had him leaving you letters in the basement like some kind of—”
He stopped. He started again somewhere else.
“And you paid this man. With what? Your forty-one dollars?”
“The headstone can,” I said.
Kim said his name from the hallway. He didn’t hear her, or he didn’t care.
“He told me,” Craig said. “At the reservoir. He sat in my rental car and told me the house was mine and I should do whatever I wanted with it. He said Dawn’s got the county. He said that.”
I could hear Yolanda as clearly as if she were standing by the mailbox. Not the other one.
“I brought Sherry through here so we’d be ready,” he said. “So you wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. That’s what a son does. He plans ahead. You don’t get to stand there and make that into something.”
Sherry picked her clipboard up off the counter.
“Craig, I’m going to call my broker,” she said. Then she looked straight at me, for the first time all week. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
She let herself out the front door. Her shoes squeaked twice on the linoleum and she was gone.
Gene Holt folded his napkin around the lemon bar and put it in his shirt pocket. He came over to the urn and touched my elbow on his way past. The rest of them followed him, one and two at a time. Some of them looked at me, and some of them looked at the floor.
“You planned this,” Craig said. “You stood at that urn all day and let me talk.”
“You told me not to make it ugly,” I said.
Kim came up the hall and took his arm above the elbow.
“The car, Craig,” she said.
They went out the front. He left the door open behind him, and the candles kept on burning.
The Coffee Can
Craig and Kim spent that night at the motel by the interstate and flew out of Champaign the next morning.
It took seven months and two more of Leonard Szabo’s invoices before the deed came across my own counter at the recorder’s office with my name on it. My supervisor let me record it myself. I did it at my desk on my lunch and didn’t tell anybody why I was smiling.
Craig’s attorney in Tucson called Leonard twice that fall. Then he stopped calling.
In the spring Craig came for the truck and the boat and the gun cabinet, with a friend and a rented trailer. He came on a workday, while I was in Charleston. He left Pop’s spare house key on the kitchen table, where the lemons had been, and no note with it.
He hasn’t called. Kim sent a card at Christmas with her own name signed in it and nothing else.
The can had a hundred and seventy dollars in it after I paid Leonard. I put forty in every payday, on top of the dryer, the same way I’d taken it out.
The monument man in Charleston had shown me a book the summer before, back when nobody needed anything yet. There was a stone in it with a little etched picture of a glass bottle, the kind Pop’s line turned out for thirty-one years. I’d wanted that one. It was eleven hundred and eighty dollars before the etching.
The etching was another four hundred. It didn’t happen.
The stone went in the next spring. It was gray granite, with his name and his two years and nothing else. It went in a year later than it should have, and I heard about that from two women at church who thought I couldn’t hear them.
I paid the monument man on his tailgate at the cemetery. I’d brought the can with me. I counted it out in twenties and tens and some fives, and a roll of quarters I’d been keeping for the laundromat before I didn’t need the laundromat anymore.
“It’s all there,” he said, and counted it twice anyway.
When he drove off, I stood a while at the plain stone.
Then I went home and down to the basement and set the empty can on the shelf over the washer.
The key was still on its bootlace, hanging on a nail beside the tarp I’d never put back.
I dropped it in the can and pressed the lid down with the heel of my hand.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s sleeping on a parent’s couch this year.
If you’re interested in more stories about family dynamics and unexpected situations, you might enjoy reading about My Brother Spent His Birthday Money Replacing The Metronome They Broke or even The Decree Handed Shawna Alternate Weekends, and She Came for Six of Them. And for another tale of mysterious happenings, check out what happened when Abby Lined Her Shoes Up by the Bed Every Night for Four Months.
