I took the key home and didn’t tell anyone about it for three days. Then my father’s sister called and asked whether Frank had come to see me after the funeral. I asked her why, and there was a long silence before she said, “Because your mother promised him something before she ever met your father.” I drove to the house the key belonged to, and Frank was already there waiting for me. He told me the house had originally belonged to my mother’s older sister, who disappeared from the family in 1997. Nobody had ever told me she existed.
Frank said she had been sick and afraid and had asked my mother to keep the house in case she ever needed somewhere safe to go. She died before she could return, and my mother kept paying the taxes without telling anyone. Then Frank admitted the part that explained all eleven funerals. He had been my mother’s sister’s husband, and after her death he promised to keep watching over the family even though he had no legal reason to stay. My mother was the only person who knew his real connection to us, and she asked him to keep coming because she knew everyone would eventually assume he was family. I asked why my mother had never told me, and he said, “Because she didn’t want you asking why your aunt disappeared, and she didn’t want you knowing what your father had done.”
I stood inside that empty house and suddenly understood why Frank had always stayed at the back of every funeral. He wasn’t avoiding us; he was making sure nobody noticed how closely he was watching. He told me my mother had asked him to give me the key only after she was gone because she wanted me to decide what happened next. I asked what my father had done, and Frank said my mother would have wanted me to hear that story from her sister’s letters, not from him. He handed me a box that had been sitting in the house since 1997, and my name was written on the top in my mother’s handwriting. I didn’t open it there. I carried it to my car and sat with my hands on the steering wheel for almost an hour. For the first time, I understood that Frank hadn’t been attending our funerals for twenty-eight years because he was pretending to be family—he had been there because he already was.
