October 12, 2007
By the deadline, the shop's history occupied eleven boxes and two contradictory lists.
Peter's list told us where things would go. Mine told us what we knew about them. We had tried combining the lists, but the paper became so crowded that neither of us could find anything. At last we laid them side by side and worked down the room together.
“Winter poster,” he said.
“Original with Leah. No permission yet.”
“Birds.”
“Unsigned. Ruth can't identify it.”
“Put Dad for now.”
I looked up.
Peter exhaled. “All right. Don't.”
There were other things he remembered better than I did. He recognized a delivery route written in pencil on a carton and knew which customer had brought us the gold wedding invitations. He could tell a job Dad had run from a job Dad had merely delivered, because Peter had carried the finished boxes to the car.
I wrote those distinctions down. They did not make Dad smaller. They made the shop busier, more crowded, more like the place I remembered before the photograph of one man in a doorway had replaced it.
At noon we found two copies of the supper card. One had lettering pasted onto the border. The other was a proof with a correction in Ruth's hand. Neither told us who had drawn the letters themselves.
“Our mother,” Peter said.
“Maybe.”
“You know she did that sort of thing.”
“That isn't the same as knowing she did this.”
He stared at the card. Our mother had been dead long enough that we no longer expected to find anything new about her. I could see how much he wanted this small piece of skill returned to her.
“We can say we don't know,” I said gently.
“She gets left out again.”
That stopped me. Accuracy could feel like withholding when someone had already received so little credit. I turned the card over, hoping for initials, a date, some instruction left by a more considerate past.
There was only a glue stain.
“We can remember what we saw her do,” I said. “We don't have to make this card carry all of it.”
Peter nodded, though he did not look satisfied. I wasn't satisfied either. We put the card in the uncertain pile.
The FBI account I had read described agents checking material for years. I had no business borrowing their conclusions or their methods for a few family boxes. But I could borrow a little patience. A thing did not become certain because I wanted a name to put beside it.
By three, Peter had cleared the cabinets promised to Sam. I carried the paper boxes to the front, labeling each on two sides. My apartment had a dry corner where a sewing table usually stood. I would have to fold the table away.
“You can't take all this on the bus,” Peter said.
“I know.”
He jingled his car keys. I had been so ready to defend my delay that I had forgotten he might help me finish it.
We made two trips. On the second, he carried the heaviest box up the stairs without commenting on the number of stairs. I moved a chair to make room and found the apartment suddenly arranged around work I had chosen rather than furniture I had inherited.
At the shop, one drawer still held correspondence. Near the bottom, behind a supplier's catalogue, I found a packet of Ruth's letters. I recognized her name on the envelopes and stopped.
Peter reached toward them. “Anything we need?”
“Something she needs back.”
I put them in a clean envelope without opening them. Beside their entry on my list I wrote: Return intact to Ruth.
Peter checked the empty cabinets one last time. Then he drew a line through my deadline.
“Paper out,” he said.
I had kept my part of the agreement. The uncertain pile still existed, but it was no longer an excuse for leaving everything where it had been.