Then I pointed at her.
“But I have a condition.”
“You’re negotiating with me?”
“I learned from the best.”
Margaret laughed.
A real laugh.
Loud and surprised.
“What condition?”
“You come back for Willa’s graduation. And when she goes to college, you visit her. And when she designs her first real building, you come see it.”
“That’s three conditions.”
“Take it or leave it.”
Margaret extended her hand as though we were finalizing a business agreement.
“Deal.”
Then she asked me for the brass key.
I pulled it from my pocket.
She studied it.
“The new family changes the locks Monday.”
“I know.”
“Keep it anyway.”
She folded my fingers around it.
“This was the first house that trusted you. Never forget that you were worth trusting.”
I drove home without furniture, old dishes, or boxes of books.
The only thing sitting on the passenger seat was a shoebox.
Willa was at the kitchen table working on scholarship applications.
“How was Mrs. Whitaker?”
I set the box in front of her.
“Open it.”
The first things she discovered were her childhood drawings.
“She kept these?”
“Every one.”
Then she found the white envelope.
For Willa.
She opened it, read the bank statement, and then read it again.
Her hands began trembling.
Finally, she covered her face and cried.
