Chapter 4

The third year after my mother died, I went back to our old hometown.

To clear out what she'd left behind. Clothes, books, a sewing machine she'd used for almost twenty years. And one small metal box. Inside it were her bankbooks, the property deed, a few letters. At the very bottom, a key.

A little brown tag hung from the key, and on it was written:

"Finch safe deposit box · Madison Avenue branch · Section B, No. 17"

I asked my father. He said, what safe deposit box, your mother never mentioned any such thing. I asked my aunts and uncle too, and none of them knew. I put the key away in the bag I always carried, meaning to stop by the bank and ask the next time I went home.

But the next time I went home was three years later. In between I put it off more times than I can count. The kids got sick, the company had layoffs, the apartment renovation, and the working capital Arnold needed when he and his friends opened the studio together.

After a while I even forgot the key existed.

Until two o'clock this morning, when I got up from the computer and walked forty-seven laps around the living room.

On the forty-eighth, I stopped.

I opened the bottom drawer of the shoe cabinet. Inside were expired face masks, a half-used tin of shoe polish, a stack of shopping receipts. My bag was at the very back. A black canvas bag with a zipper so stiff it took both hands to pull open.

The key was still there. Exactly as it had been three years ago. The tag had yellowed. The handwriting was my mother's.

I took out my phone, opened the map, and typed in "Madison Avenue branch."

The map told me: this branch was merged and closed in 2020. Operations relocated to the Franklin Street branch.

Merged and closed six years ago. Which meant the box had been sitting there for at least six years.

At four in the morning, I sent an email to that branch's customer service address.

"Hello, my name is May James," I wrote. "My mother left me the key to her safe deposit box. I'd like to book an appointment to open it today."

After that line, I stopped. I felt like I should say something more. That my mother's name was Madeline James, for instance, though I couldn't recall her full ID number. But then I thought, the bank probably only needs to verify the key. It doesn't need a story.

It doesn't need to be told, by some stranger at a bank, that this key is the one thing my mother left me that I've never known the contents of. In the last few years of her life, a whole call log stood between us, fewer than twenty calls a year. The last time was when I told her I was getting married. She was silent on the other end for a long while, long enough that I thought the line had dropped.

She said, May, as long as you've thought it through yourself, that's fine.

That was the third-to-last thing she ever said to me.