Albert
I stayed on the porch step for a long while.
The elm trees along the street were still wet from the night before, their leaves catching the morning light and holding onto it. A car passed. A neighbor I barely knew walked her small dog and lifted a hand in that particular wave that means good morning without asking for conversation. The street went about its ordinary morning business the way streets do when something extraordinary has just happened at their edges.
I held the key in one hand and the letter in the other and thought about Albert — forty years running a hardware store, forty-three years with Estelle, eight months under trees and on porches and in shelters, hauling that old backpack from place to place. About a son who hadn’t stopped his wife from changing the locks. About a storage unit he’d kept paying for because he wasn’t ready to face what was in it, and a summer storm that had handed him a porch, soup, and my mother’s quilt — and a morning on which, apparently, he’d finally become ready.
I thought about what it means to become ready. To reach the point where the thing you’ve been holding turns into something you can set down, or in this case, something you can hand over.
I called Grace, my landlord, told her I needed the morning off, and asked if it would cause any trouble, which it wouldn’t, since my job was hourly and the hours were mine to arrange within reason, and I hadn’t taken a personal morning in the two years I’d worked there. She said of course, I thanked her, and I got in the car.
The town lay forty minutes north, the kind of small town that highway development had passed by in the nineties and had, as a result, kept a certain architectural integrity — old storefronts, wide sidewalks, the particular character of a place that has made peace with its own smallness. The storage facility sat at the edge of town, a row of orange doors behind a chain-link fence, the sort of place found in every small American town, holding the overflow of lives in various stages of continuity.
The unit number was on the tag.
I found it on the second row.
The key turned in the lock with the easy authority of a lock that had been kept up, and the door rolled up on a space that wasn’t large, maybe eight by ten, lit by the morning light spilling in through the open door. It smelled of cardboard and the particular sealed-in scent of contained time.
