He took his gloves off very slowly and asked what the pawn shop had told me. I said the saws had been sold by someone using the name on the ticket, and that the initials on the handles matched the ones missing from my husband’s workshop. The boy looked toward my garage and said, “I know who took them.” I asked him why he hadn’t told me before. He said he’d seen my nephew leaving the garage late one night and assumed I’d given him permission.
I called my nephew that evening and asked about the tools. He denied knowing anything, so I told him I’d already spoken to the pawn shop. Then the boy interrupted and said there was something else he needed to tell me. He’d been mowing my lawn for free because my husband had once helped his mother when she was sick, and he felt he owed him. He’d also noticed my nephew coming by whenever I was at physical therapy. I suddenly understood why two other things had disappeared from the garage that summer.
The next morning, I checked the old workbench and found my husband’s engraved pocketknife missing too. I called the pawn shop again, and the owner said my nephew had brought that in the same week. When I confronted him, he finally admitted he’d been selling my husband’s tools to pay off a gambling debt. Then he said something that made the boy step forward. “I figured she wouldn’t notice,” my nephew whispered. The boy looked at him and said, “She noticed because she loved him enough to remember everything he owned.”
