I never thought about that signature again. Not once, in eleven years, until three weeks ago.
It started small. Deloris mentioned, almost in passing, that she’d stored some old boxes in our garage after her last move. Years earlier, and never quite gotten around to collecting them.
I finally decided to clear them out myself. Tired of tripping over boxes. That weren’t mine in a garage that was supposed to be ours.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, kids at school, Caleb at work, the kind of quiet. Ordinary window of time I usually spent on laundry or grocery lists rather than archaeology through someone else’s belongings. I pulled on an old sweatshirt, grabbed a roll of trash bags. And told myself I’d have the whole garage sorted by dinnertime.
Most of it was exactly what you’d expect. Old holiday decorations. A broken lamp. Photo albums from decades before I ever entered the family.
Then I found the filing cabinet, tucked behind a stack of paint cans. Locked, with no key anywhere in sight.
It was heavier than it looked, dented along one corner. The kind of cabinet that had clearly moved between several houses over several decades. A faded label on the top drawer read simply “D.C. Personal,” Deloris’s initials in handwriting I recognized instantly from a dozen birthday cards over the years.
