I bought a filing cabinet at an estate sale for eleven dollars, and there was a drawer that wouldn’t open. I took it home, tipped it over, and worked on it with a screwdriver for most of an evening. Somebody had blocked it from the inside, not with a lock, but with a block of wood screwed to the frame. It had clearly been put there on purpose by someone who wanted that drawer to stay shut. Everything else in the cabinet was empty, every drawer spotless, like the man had cleared it out before he died.
I finally got the block off around midnight and pulled the drawer open. There was only one thing inside, wrapped in an old brown envelope and tied with a piece of string. There was no name on the envelope, no date, and nothing written on the outside at all. I almost threw it away because I assumed it was just another piece of junk someone had forgotten. Then I noticed the envelope was addressed on the inside, and the name written there was mine.
I stood at the kitchen table for several minutes before opening it. Inside was a single photograph of a house, taken from across the street on a rainy afternoon. I recognized the house immediately because it was the one I had lived in as a child. On the back of the photograph was a date from twenty-three years before I was born and a sentence written in blue ink. It said, “Your father told me you would never find this.”
There was one more thing underneath the photograph: a small brass key taped to a folded piece of paper. The paper contained an address that was only a few miles from the estate sale where I bought the cabinet. I drove there the next morning and found an old office building that had been empty for years. The key fit a door on the second floor, even though I had no idea how the person who left it could have known I’d ever find it. Inside was another filing cabinet, identical to mine, sitting alone in an otherwise empty room. And on top of it was a handwritten note with my name on it.:::
