We gathered at the cabin after the service. My father moved through the rooms the way you move through a place you believe belongs to you by right, opening drawers, checking cabinets, not reminiscing. Searching. I watched him from the doorway with my arms crossed.
“There has to be something,” he muttered. “He wouldn’t have just lived like this.”
“He did,” I said. “That’s exactly how he lived.”
He didn’t look at me. Diane chimed in from the kitchen: savings accounts, property, something, we need to find out what we’re dealing with before things get tied up legally. That word, we. She never said my grandfather’s name. Not once, the entire day.
I excused myself and went into his bedroom. The folded blanket on the bed. The worn boots. The small wooden box on the dresser, locked, its edges grooved from years of handling. I picked it up and ran my thumb along the worn wood. He had kept this close for a long time. That much was obvious.
I heard footsteps behind me.
“You find anything?” my father asked from the doorway.
I turned, holding the box. “No,” I said.
He studied me for a moment, then nodded once. “If you do, you tell me. We handle this as a family.” He said the word family the way people say it when they mean something narrower, more specific, more self-serving than its actual definition.
That night, after they left, I stayed alone in the cabin. The admiral’s call came at nine-thirty, and by morning I had already packed. By noon I was on the road south toward the harbor.
