“There’s something Granddad left,” he said.
I stiffened before I could stop myself.
He noticed.
“Not paperwork. Nothing about the house being mine.”
“What, then?”
“A tin. Above the old pantry shelf. He showed me where it was the summer before he died. I thought you knew.”
I fetched the step stool.
Daniel held it steady while I reached into the dark space above the shelf. My fingers closed around a small biscuit tin gritty with dust.
Inside were pencils, a measuring tape, and photographs held together with a rubber band that crumbled when I touched it.
My father had photographed the doorway every summer.
Daniel at six, solemn beneath a new mark.
Daniel at nine, laughing because my mother had put a book crookedly on his head.
And behind those pictures, older ones.
Me in a swimsuit, missing a front tooth.
Elaine with scraped knees.
I turned toward the pantry.
“Our marks are on the other side,” I whispered.
They had been hidden for years by the narrow spice rack my mother had hung there.
Daniel got a screwdriver from the drawer. He asked before touching anything.
I said yes.
When the rack came away, there we were.
Two columns of pencil lines.
Margaret, 7.
Elaine, 10.
Our childhoods had been waiting six inches from the place where I had measured my son.
At the bottom of the tin was a photograph I had never seen.
I was asleep on the cottage sofa in my work clothes. Daniel, perhaps four, lay curled against my side. My father had spread a quilt over both of us.
On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, were five words.
Our girl home for Sunday.
I sat down on the step stool.
