Original fiction · Chapter 1 of 2
Two Keys in Dad’s Toolbox
My brother was waiting in the garage when I came to collect Dad's toolbox. He was standing at the workbench with both hands flat against it, as if something underneath might shift if he let go.
“The estate sale people are coming tomorrow,” he said.
“I know. I'm taking the box today.”
We had agreed on everything else by email. He wanted the dining table. I wanted the little radio from the bathroom. The toolbox was the last thing we hadn't put next to one of our names. Dad had carried it to every apartment I ever lived in, even the ones where the landlord wouldn't let him hang a picture.
It was heavier than I expected. When I tipped it up I heard something slide beneath the tools. My brother looked away toward the street.
“Did you already go through it?”
“Just the top.”
I lifted the lid. The socket set was in its place and the pliers were wrapped in a blue rag. Under the removable tray lay a folded county map and a ring with two keys. On the map, someone had drawn a circle around a stretch of road along the river. Dad had put a star inside the circle, the way he used to mark where to pick me up from school.
“Do you know what the keys are for?”
My brother, Sam, nodded. He said one opened the padlock on a storage shed. The other opened a gate. He'd been there with Dad five or six times over the past year. I asked why he hadn't told me.
“He wanted to tell you when the roof was on.”
“On what?”
Sam took his phone out. He found a picture of a little wooden cabin with a green door. I could see a porch rail that ended abruptly on the left where somebody had run out of wood.
My parents had drawn a porch just like it on graph paper when I was thirteen. They'd stopped talking about building it after Mom moved away.
I turned the map over. There was a list of lumber sizes and a phone number I knew by heart.
It was our mother's.
