My mother-in-law pushed me down the porch steps at my own housewarming and called it a stumble. Six people saw it. She said the word “stumble” before I’d even gotten up, which is how I knew it wasn’t one. I’d hung a photograph of my parents in the front room, and that was the whole reason. “This is his house too, and his family goes on that wall,” she said.
My husband helped me up and then helped her to her car, and I didn’t see him for forty minutes. When he came back in, he sat down on the step next to me and told me what she’d said to him out there. He said she’d been crying and insisting that the photograph had to come down before his father saw it. I asked why his father would care about a picture of my parents, and my husband didn’t answer immediately. Then he told me something he’d never told me before about the house.
He said his father had tried to buy it years earlier, before we were married, but the previous owner refused to sell to him. My husband had always assumed it was because of the price. That night, he finally asked his mother what the real reason was. She told him the previous owner had known my parents and had specifically said the house would never be sold to anyone from their family. My husband asked what my parents had done, and she refused to answer. Instead, she asked him to take down the photograph before anyone else noticed it.
The next morning, my husband called the previous owner. The man was elderly but remembered the house immediately. He asked my husband whether I was his wife, and when my husband said yes, there was a long silence. Then he asked whether I had ever seen the attic. We hadn’t. He told my husband that before selling the house, he’d sealed one section of it because he’d found something behind the wall. He said the discovery had happened in 1991, and my father’s name was written on the box he’d found. Then he said, “If that photograph is hanging in your front room, you need to know why your father wanted me to keep that box hidden.”
