She Showed Me the Loose Brick

The dream had none of the usual dream physics. My mother and I stood in her garden in ordinary daylight and she was businesslike — she'd been dead three weeks and had clearly been waiting for me to be ready for instructions.

'You're selling the house,' she said. Not a question; we were. 'Before you do: third brick under the kitchen window, left of the drainpipe. It wobbles. Your father's stubbornness is in there.' Then she looked at me with terrible tenderness and said the part that was actually for me — I'll keep that — and the dream closed like a book.

I drove out the next morning feeling like an idiot with a crowbar. Under the kitchen window, left of the drainpipe, I counted three bricks and pushed. The third moved. Behind it, wrapped in two freezer bags and a rubber band perished to threads: a tobacco tin.

Inside was my father's stubbornness, catalogued. The wedding ring he'd sworn was lost at the beach in 1988 — my mother had apparently confiscated it after he pawned it once in a bad month, and 'lost at the beach' was the treaty they'd agreed on. A letter to her, in his handwriting, from before I existed, which I read standing in the flower bed and will not summarize. And, absurdly, perfectly: the key to a wall clock we'd all assumed broken for thirty years, with a paper tag in her writing — 'wind him on Sundays, he likes it.'

The clock is on my wall now. It runs. It had only ever needed the key.

My brother, the family's chief skeptic, examined the tin, the bags, the brick, and me. His entire verdict: 'She never once trusted us to find anything without a map.' Which is true, and is also, I think, why she came back with one.