Margaret moved through the house like a woman gathering up the pieces of a life she had been told she no longer owned. In the bedroom, she packed clothes into the suitcase Rosa had brought — dresses, cardigans, her good coat, the nightgown with the faded roses. She folded each thing with care, because folding was something her hands knew how to do even when her heart did not. The quilt on the bed was the one Henry's mother had pieced, its colors faded by forty years of washing, and Margaret ran her hand over it once before she turned away, because taking the quilt would have been like taking the bed itself, and she was not ready for that. On the dresser stood a framed photograph of her and Henry on their thirtieth anniversary, both of them laughing at something the photographer had said, and she wrapped it in a cardigan and laid it gently in the suitcase, on top of the folded clothes, where it would ride safely. In the bathroom, she took her hairpins and her hand cream and the small bottle of lavender water she had used since she was a girl.
And then she went to the living room, to the cabinet where she kept her sewing box, and she found it exactly where it had always been, on the second shelf, its wooden lid worn smooth by her hands. She lifted it down and opened it, and there were her needles in their felt roll, her spools of thread arranged by color, her thimble, her scissors with the black handles, and a photograph tucked beneath the pincushion — Henry at thirty, in his work shirt, smiling at the camera with sawdust on his sleeve. She held the photograph for a long moment, and then she tucked it into her purse, next to her wallet, where it belonged.
It was while she was closing the sewing box that her fingers found something at the bottom of her purse she had not thought about in years. A small brass key, no longer than her thumb, warm from sitting against her wallet. She held it up to the light, and the light caught the worn grooves in it, and she knew at once what it was.
Rosa, she said, her voice very quiet. "This is the key to Henry's toolbox."
Rosa came to stand beside her. "The toolbox in the garage?"
Henry kept it locked, Margaret said, turning the key in her fingers. "He said a man's tools are his livelihood, and a livelihood ought to be kept under lock. After he died, I — " She stopped. "I put the key in my purse the week after the funeral, because I couldn't bear to leave it in the house where I might lose it, and then I forgot it was there. Thirty years, Rosa. It's been in my purse for thirty years, and I never once remembered it."
Until now, Rosa said gently.
Until now, Margaret agreed. And she thought about what that meant — that her hands had been carrying something important all this time without her knowing it, the way her mind had been carrying the truth about Henry's death without her knowing that, either. Things kept, things hidden, things waiting for the day they were needed.
Sarah, who had been photographing the mail on the table, looked up. "Margaret, if Henry kept anything in that toolbox — papers, a journal, anything at all — it would still be there. Michael never had the key."
Margaret looked at the small brass key in her palm, and then at the door to the garage, and she felt something settle in her chest, something like a door closing and a door opening at the same time. She thought of all the letters she had never read, all the envelopes Michael had opened and answered and filed away, and she thought about how a house could be full of a person's belongings and still be emptied of them, one small theft at a time. The key in her hand was the opposite of that. It was a small thing, kept without knowing, that no one had been able to take from her — because no one had known it was there, least of all herself.
Duke, she said, "would you come with me to the garage?"
The garage smelled of sawdust and old oil and time. It was the smell Margaret remembered from a thousand evenings when Henry had come in from his work with sawdust on his sleeves and kissed her cheek and left a faint print of it there, and the smell hit her so hard when Duke opened the side door that she had to stop on the threshold and put a hand on the doorframe to steady herself.
Take your time, Duke said. He did not touch her, and she was grateful for that, because his kindness had always been the kind that left room for a person to stand on her own feet.
The garage was much as Henry had left it, and that was both a comfort and a strangeness. His workbench ran along the far wall, scarred with saw cuts and stained with varnish, and his tools hung on the pegboard in the shapes he had arranged them, though a fine layer of dust lay over everything, and a cobweb had claimed one corner. There were the planes he had loved best, their wooden bodies worn smooth by his hands; there was the square he had used to check every corner of every cabinet he ever built; there were pencils, still sharpened, in a tin can by the vise. The light came through the single high window in a pale autumn shaft, and dust motes turned slowly in it, and Margaret thought that the garage felt like a room that had been holding its breath for thirty years. She could almost hear him in it — the rasp of a plane, the tap of a hammer — and the almost-hearing was worse than silence.