“We try again,” I said.
I slid the key back in, slow this time, and turned it, and the lock gave with a heavy clunk.
I gripped the cold metal handle and hauled the door up. It groaned all the way to the top on its old rails, and dust poured down through the band of sunlight that spilled inside.
At first all I could see were large shapes under pale drop cloths, ghostly in the dim.
Then the daylight reached far enough in to touch the wood at the edges, and I saw the color of it, the warm honey color of wood that has been sanded and oiled by someone who cared.
I stepped inside. Everyone else stayed put behind the line of the door, just as Dad had said.
I pulled the first cloth off, and my breath left me.
A crib. A handmade crib, standing beside a changing table, and a chest of drawers, and a rocking chair. All of it made by hand. And when I looked closer I saw the details, the things that told you how many hours had gone into it. Little curved moons carved along the top rail of the crib. Stars cut into the drawer fronts of the chest. Small wooden clouds tucked in under the arms of the rocking chair, so a person sitting in it would rest their hands on a little cloud.
Behind me, Aunt Sandy covered her mouth with both hands.
“Oh, Byron,” she said softly.
I went to the rocking chair. I pulled the cloth all the way off and ran my hand along the smooth arm of it, and then I felt something. A roughness on the underside. Carving.
I crouched and tilted my head to see it, and there was my name.
Chloe.
Not carved across the front, where anybody would see it and know. Carved underneath the arm, where only the person actually sitting in the chair, actually holding onto it, would ever find it.
“He made this for me,” I said. My voice did not sound like my own. “He made all of this for me.”
Joshua spoke from the doorway, gentle.
“He knew we wanted kids someday,” he said. “He knew, Chlo.”
I turned around and stared at him. “You told him that?”
Joshua nodded. “He asked me once. Last spring, when we were doing the porch. He asked me what kind of future we pictured, the two of us. So I told him the truth.”
I looked back at the crib. At the moons and the stars and the clouds. Dad had spent five years building furniture for a grandchild who did not exist yet, for a future he must have known, some part of him, he might not live to see.
And he had hidden it. All this love, boxed up and padlocked in the dark, for five years.
I did not understand yet why he would hide something so beautiful.
I was about to find out.
“That’s it?” Greg said from behind Joshua. “That’s what he locked up for five years? Baby furniture?”
His voice was too light. Way too light, and pitched a little too high, and I turned to look at him.
That is when Sadie, stretching to see past me, pointed toward the back of the garage.
“Chloe, what’s behind the crib?”
I followed her finger. There, against the back wall, stood an old television set on a rolling cart, and beside it, lined up on a shelf, a row of VHS tapes.
I crossed the garage and knelt to read the labels on the first two.
