Chapter 14 - The Cherry Box
By May, the apple trees behind the garage were full of pink blossoms that dropped white petals over the grass like snow when the wind came off the hills.
I was sitting on the back porch steps with Lily in my lap, watching my father nail a loose slat back onto the white picket fence that bordered the garden. My mother was inside, her vacuum cleaner humming in the parlor—a steady, drone-like roar that signaled she was doing her spring cleaning three weeks late because she had spent too much time arguing with the plumber about the basement drain.
The screen door creaked open.
My mother walked out onto the porch, carrying a small, square cherry wood box with a brass latch—the same box my father had brought down to the parlor on Christmas night.
She didn't sit in the rocking chair. She walked down the two wooden steps, stood beside me, and set the box on the cedar board between us.
"What’s this?" I asked, looking up at her face. The sun had brought out a few pale freckles across the bridge of her nose that I hadn't seen since I was a teenager.
"Your father forgot to give you the rest of them," she said, her voice neutral, almost formal. "He left them in the bottom of the cedar chest behind the winter quilts."
I unlatched the brass hook and opened the lid.
Inside weren't envelopes this time. There were four small, folded pieces of heavy parchment paper—the kind my father used to use for his architectural sketches when he worked for the county engineering office before he retired.
I unfolded the top one.
May 14, it read in his precise, sloping hand. Today she smiled at the ceiling fan for ten minutes like it was an old friend. Your mother thinks she’s too easily amused. I think she’s just smart enough to know what’s worth looking at.
I looked up at my mother. She was staring out at the apple blossoms, her arms crossed over her gray cardigan, her expression unreadable.
"He wrote those when you were six months old," she said quietly. "I told him he was wasting good paper."
"Did you?"
"I did." She turned her head, her dark eyes meeting mine for three seconds—no longer—before she looked back toward the fence where my father was hammering a galvanized nail into the cedar post. "He kept them anyway. He’s very stubborn about things he puts in boxes."
May you like
She reached down, her fingers brushing the edge of the cherry wood box.
"Bring her back on Friday," she said, turning toward the screen door. "We’re planting the tomatoes. The soil’s warm enough."
