My uncle and I struggled to get the wardrobe through the front doorway.
Its upper corner caught against the frame, leaving a thin red scrape across the white paint. We had to tilt it sideways, lifting the damaged leg clear of the threshold while the wardrobe groaned around us.
“Don't force it,” my uncle warned. “The joints are older than you think.”
I adjusted my grip.
From inside the house came the clink of a spoon against a coffee cup. Michael was still sitting in the living room, apparently unconcerned that we were wrestling a piece of furniture down the porch steps. Sarah had already begun discussing where she would park the Tahoe.
My mother stood beside the front door.
“Your uncle doesn't need to hurt himself over that thing,” she said.
“I'll be fine,” he replied.
He didn't look at her.
We carried the wardrobe down the steps and across the driveway toward the rented U-Haul. The October air smelled of damp leaves and exhaust. Somewhere down the street, a lawn mower started, then settled into a steady mechanical drone.
I had rented the truck because I didn't own a vehicle large enough to transport the wardrobe. When I made the reservation, I assumed I'd be bringing home a few boxes of my father's clothes and perhaps his old toolbox.
I hadn't imagined that one piece of furniture would be the only thing my family allowed me to take.
We rested the wardrobe on the truck's lowered ramp.
My uncle wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “You sure you want this?”
“Yes.”
He studied me for a moment.
“Your father cared about that thing.”
“I know.”
“More than people realized.”
I looked at him. “What do you mean?”
He glanced toward the house.
Before he could answer, my mother called from the porch.
“Are you two finished? We have things to do inside.”
My uncle's expression changed. Whatever he had been about to tell me, he swallowed it.
“Let's get it secured,” he said.
We eased the wardrobe into the truck and fastened it against the side wall with two straps. I checked the buckles twice. The doors had a habit of swinging open when the furniture moved, so I tied them shut with a length of rope I found in the truck's storage compartment.
When I climbed down, my mother was waiting beside the driveway.
“You could have taken something useful,” she said.
I brushed dust from my palms. “It was what you offered.”
“I offered you the choice.”
“No, Mom. You offered them the house, the car, the money, and the gold. Then you told me not to be greedy when there was nothing left.”
Her jaw tightened.
“Your brother has a family to support.”
“So does Sarah.”
“She has children.”
“And Michael doesn't?”
My mother looked toward the living room window, where I could see my brother moving around with his wife.
“Don't start,” she said.
I almost asked her what she thought I had been doing for the last seventy-three days. I had supported my father through his illness, arranged his funeral, and paid the expenses. I had done all of it without demanding that anyone praise me.
Now, standing beside a rented truck, I was apparently asking for too much simply by noticing that I had been excluded.
Instead, I opened the driver's door.
“I'm leaving.”
My mother stepped back from the truck.
“Take that thing wherever you want. Just don't come back complaining that we didn't give you anything.”
I shut the door and started the engine.
Through the windshield, I watched her turn toward the house. She didn't wave. She didn't ask me to call when I arrived safely. She walked inside and closed the door behind her.
I drove away with the wardrobe rattling softly in the back.
For several miles, I kept glancing at the rearview mirror, expecting some new message to appear on my phone. Perhaps Michael would ask me to return the key I had used to enter the house. Perhaps Sarah would send a photograph of the gold bracelets and tell me how much they were worth.
Nothing came.
At a red light, I reached into my handbag and touched the notebook containing the funeral expenses.
The pages were soft at the corners from being handled so often. On the final page, I had written the total in large numbers.
$4,500.
I had paid every cent.
The light turned green, and I drove on.
My apartment was on the second floor of a modest building on the edge of town. The staircase was narrow, the parking lot was cracked, and the hallway smelled of detergent from the laundry room downstairs. There was no elevator and no spare room in which to keep a piece of furniture as large as the wardrobe.
I couldn't leave it in the truck overnight.
I called a local mover and paid for two men to help carry it upstairs. By the time they finished, my arms were shaking and sweat had gathered beneath my collar.
The wardrobe occupied almost an entire wall of my living room.
Under the bright ceiling light, its condition was worse than I remembered. The cherry-red finish had worn away in irregular patches. One side panel had separated slightly from the frame. The handles were dull, and the bottom drawer sat crookedly in its runners.
The landscaping brick had left a pale mark on the damaged leg.
I stood before it for a long time.
My father had kept his flannel shirts inside the upper compartment. His old work gloves and garage tools had once occupied the lower drawers. He stored newspapers there, too, along with instruction manuals for appliances nobody else in the family knew how to repair.
Whenever someone complained about the wardrobe, he defended it.
“Still does its job,” he would say.
My mother used to answer that it made the room look shabby.
My father would shrug. “Then don't look at it.”
I smiled at the memory, but the smile faded quickly.
I had no idea what I intended to do with the wardrobe. I couldn't throw it away. I couldn't sell it for enough money to justify the effort. I certainly couldn't make it the centerpiece of my apartment.
For the moment, I decided to clean it.
I fetched a bucket, a soft cloth, and a small bottle of furniture cleaner. As I wiped the first door, dust gathered in gray streaks along the cloth. The smell of old wood became stronger.
The right door had a shallow scratch near the bottom. I remembered making it when I was about nine years old, dragging a toy car across the floor and crashing it into the wardrobe.
My father had found me crying beside it.
“It's only wood,” he told me. “We'll fix it.”
He never did fix that scratch.
For years, I thought it was because he didn't have time. Now I wondered whether he had simply decided it didn't matter.
I opened the upper compartment.
A few empty hangers rattled against the wooden rail. The cedar lining had darkened with age, but the shelves were clean. My father had apparently emptied most of his clothes before his final hospital admission, leaving only a folded flannel shirt tucked into the far corner.
I lifted it carefully.
The fabric still held the faint smell of his aftershave.
I pressed it against my chest, closed my eyes, and stood there until the apartment became quiet around me.
When I finally lowered the shirt, something slipped from its pocket.
A small brass key struck the floor.
I bent to retrieve it.
The key was old, with a rounded head and a narrow shaft. A strip of yellowed tape had been wrapped around its handle. There was handwriting on the tape, but most of the ink had faded.
I turned it toward the light.
Two letters remained visible.
B. S.
I didn't recognize them.
My first thought was that the key belonged to a box in the garage. My father had collected old padlocks, and he was the sort of man who kept keys long after forgetting what they opened.
I placed it on the coffee table beside my notebook.
Then I returned to the wardrobe.
The lower drawers were more difficult to open. The first contained a handful of screws, a measuring tape, and two small screwdrivers. The second held folded newspapers and a yellow envelope filled with receipts.
I began sorting the papers into piles.
Most were ordinary household records: repairs to the furnace, replacement parts for the lawn mower, an invoice from a plumber. Several dated back more than twenty years.
At the bottom of the envelope, I found a photograph.
It showed my father standing beside the wardrobe when its paint was still glossy and the doors hung straight. He was younger, perhaps in his late thirties, with dark hair and a broad smile I rarely saw in his later years.
He had one hand resting on the wardrobe's upper edge.
Behind him stood my mother.
She wasn't looking at the camera.
She was staring at the wardrobe.
I turned the photograph over.
My father's handwriting covered the back in neat, blocky letters.
KEEP THIS WITH THE RED ONE. DON'T LET IT LEAVE THE FAMILY.
There was no date and no explanation.
I read the words again.
My father had never been sentimental about possessions. He wore the same work boots until the soles separated. He repaired broken appliances rather than buying new ones. When my mother wanted to replace the living-room furniture, he had argued that the old pieces were still perfectly usable.
Yet he had written a specific instruction about this wardrobe.
And he had hidden it among papers nobody else had bothered to examine.
I returned to the living room and looked at the furniture from across the room.
The wardrobe stood in the same position it had occupied in my parents' house, its red surface reflecting the ceiling light in dull patches.
I went back to the photograph.
KEEP THIS WITH THE RED ONE.
I glanced at the brass key on the table.
B. S.
A box, perhaps. A storage unit. A safe deposit box.
The possibilities multiplied without giving me an answer.
I took out my phone and called my uncle.
He answered on the fourth ring.
“You get that old thing settled in?” he asked.
“It's in my apartment.”
“Good.”
“Uncle, I found something.”
I told him about the photograph and the note.
The line went silent.
I waited.
“Did you find anything else?” he finally asked.
“A brass key in Dad's shirt pocket. There's tape on it with two letters. B. S.”
I heard him draw a slow breath.
“Don't throw that key away.”
“I wasn't planning to.”
“And don't let your mother take the wardrobe back.”
The words were so immediate that I straightened in my chair.
“Why would she want it back?”
“I don't know what she wants anymore,” he said. “But your father asked me to make sure you got that wardrobe if anything happened to him.”
I stared at the photograph.
“He told you that?”
“Not recently. Years ago. He made me promise.”
“Why?”
Another pause.
“I think you should come see me tomorrow.”
“Why can't you tell me now?”
“Because I need to find something first.”
I gripped the phone tighter. “What something?”
“I'll explain when you get here.”
He ended the call before I could ask another question.
For several seconds, I remained seated, listening to the faint hum of the refrigerator.
Then my phone vibrated.
A message from my mother appeared on the screen.
Bring the wardrobe back tomorrow. We need to talk about what you took.
I read it twice.
She hadn't cared whether I wanted the wardrobe. She hadn't cared where I planned to put it. She had watched me drag it out of her house with the expression of someone relieved to be rid of an inconvenience.
Now, less than three hours later, she wanted it returned.
I looked at the old photograph again.
My father's handwriting seemed darker beneath the lamp.
Don't let it leave the family.
For the first time since the estate meeting, I wondered whether my mother had been afraid that I would take the wardrobe.
Or whether she had been afraid that I would finally discover why my father had insisted I should have it.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: My Uncle Finally Explained Why My Father Had Chosen Me to Receive the One Possession Nobody Else Wanted
My Mother Divided Three Decades of Family Wealth Before Pointing to the Broken Wardrobe in the Corner
Part 2 of 20
