He didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
Then he tried to smile.
“What measuring tape?”
I pulled my hand away. I turned my phone screen away from him.
“Mom found your passport,” I said.
“Oh. Great.” His voice was too bright. “Great. Tell her to bring it. We’ve still got time if she—”
“She also found a receipt.”
The fake brightness drained out of his face.
“Sheila…”
“Did you sell Dad’s tools?”
He glanced around at the people near us. A family with three kids sitting at the next table. A businessman on his phone. A couple in matching neck pillows.
He lowered his voice.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“It’s not complicated, Dereck. It’s yes or no.”
He exhaled. A long breath.
“I was going to explain everything,” he said. “After our trip.”
I stared at him.
“After our trip?”
He reached for my arm.
“Babe. Please. People are looking.”
I stepped back. Out of his reach.
“Did you arrange,” I said, very slowly, “for somebody to come and collect everything while we were gone? While we were in Portugal? While I couldn’t do anything about it?”
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to.
I called my mother back.
She picked up before it even rang on my end. She’d been holding the phone, waiting.
“Mom. Stay at the house. Okay?”
“Sheila, what is that receipt? What is it?”
I closed my eyes.
“I think Dereck sold Dad’s workshop.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“What?” my mother said.
“Please keep the paperwork safe, Mom. Don’t let anybody take it. Don’t let him take it. I’m coming home.”
I ended the call.
Dereck was staring at me.
“You’re not seriously canceling our vacation,” he said, “over some old tools?”
I looked at him.
I didn’t recognize him. Six years. And I didn’t recognize his face.
“Don’t call them that,” I said.
He rubbed his forehead with both hands.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Then how did you mean it?”
He looked over my shoulder toward the security line. At the departure board. LISBON. 9:05. ON TIME.
“We’re going to miss our flight,” he said.
“Then we’ll miss it.”
We left the airport separately.
He wanted to drive me. I said no.
He had to wait anyway, to get our suitcases pulled off the plane. It took forty-five minutes and three different airline employees and a lot of apologizing.
I didn’t wait for him.
I walked out the big sliding doors and got into the first taxi in the line. An older man with a gray beard and a Yankees cap. He took one look at my face in the rearview mirror and didn’t say anything for the whole forty-minute drive.
I sat in the back seat and looked at the photograph on my phone.
The receipt. The passport. The measuring tape.
I zoomed in on the measuring tape. On the worn spot on the brass, where his thumb used to rest.
I didn’t cry.
I think I was too angry to cry.
When I walked into our kitchen, my mother was sitting at the table.
She stood up when she saw me. She didn’t say anything. She just came across the kitchen and wrapped her arms around me and held on.
My mother’s small. Five foot one. She smelled like her lavender hand cream.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” she said into my shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
“I opened his drawer. I just wanted to find the passport.”
“I know, Mom. You did the right thing.”
She pulled back and looked at me. Her eyes were red.
Then she let go and walked back to the table. She picked something up.
The receipt.
She put it down in front of me.
I read it, sitting at my own kitchen table, with my mother standing behind my chair.
The receipt listed nearly everything from Dad’s workshop.
His table saw. The one he’d saved two years to buy.
His drill press. His band saw. His lathe, where he’d turned table legs and spindles and, once, a set of wooden chess pieces for my tenth birthday.
The oak workbench. The one he’d built himself the year I was born. With our initials carved in the corner.
His six shop cabinets.
Hand tools, assorted. Forty years of chisels and saws and files and rasps. Some of them had belonged to his father.
Clamps, approx. 40.
At the bottom was a total. A big one. More money than I’d expected. More than enough for a kitchen.
A buyer had paid Dereck for all of it. A man named Tomás Rivera, from somewhere called Rivera Custom Cabinetry.
Collection: Friday. 11:00 a.m.
I looked at the clock on the microwave.
8:42.
There were barely two hours left.
My mother sat down next to me. She put her hand on my back.
“I recognized the unit number right away,” she said quietly. “B-17. I wrote it on my calendar for a year. Every time I went out there to check the humidity.”
“Why was Dad’s measuring tape in Dereck’s drawer?” I asked.
My mother shook her head slowly.
“I don’t know, dear,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”
I turned the receipt over.
On the back, in blue ink, there was a short handwritten note. It wasn’t Dereck’s handwriting. It must have been the buyer’s.
Small items already removed.
I turned the receipt back over, searching the front again. Looking for something I’d missed. Some list. Some explanation.
Nothing.
Small items already removed.
“What small items?” I said out loud. “What small items?”
My mother looked at me.
She stood up and picked up her purse.
“Sheila,” she said. “Let’s go to the storage unit. Right now.”
My mother drove. I sat in the passenger seat with the receipt in my lap.
Neither of us said anything for most of the drive.
Then, at a red light, my mother said, “Your father would’ve had a fit.”
“I know.”
“He would’ve driven out there in his pajamas.”
“I know.”
“He would’ve stood in front of that door with a hammer.”
I almost laughed.
“He would’ve measured Dereck,” I said. “With the tape. And then told him exactly how many inches short he was.”
My mother laughed. It came out as half a sob.
The storage place on Route 40 was quiet at that hour. Just a few cars in the lot.
The facility manager was sitting behind the counter in the little front office, drinking coffee from a thermos and watching a game show on a small TV. He was in his sixties, heavy, with reading glasses on top of his head. His name tag said HAL.
He looked up when we came in. He recognized me.
“Morning, ma’am,” he said. “Mrs. Callahan-Price, right? B-17?”
“That’s right.”
“Didn’t expect to see you today.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “There’s a collection scheduled for your unit later this morning. Eleven o’clock. Fella with a box truck.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
