The Locked Drawer I Opened After My Father Died

For my entire childhood there was one locked drawer in my father's desk. Bottom right, always locked, a small brass keyhole, the only locked thing in an otherwise open house. When I asked about it as a kid he would say, lightly, that it was just boring paperwork, and change the subject. I stopped asking. It became invisible, the way things do.

After he died, clearing his study, I remembered it. I found the little key eventually, taped under a shelf, hidden but kept, and I sat down alone one evening and opened the drawer that had been locked my whole life.

Inside was not boring paperwork. Inside was a second wallet. Worn, used, real. And in the wallet, a driver's license with my father's photograph, unmistakably him, younger, and a different name. Not his name. A whole other name, with an address I did not recognize. There were a few cards in that other name. There was a small ring of keys. And there was a slip of paper with an address across town and the word "apartment" and a number.