The man went quiet when I read him the receipt number. Then he asked me what year I had lost the wallet. I told him it had been October, but I couldn’t remember the exact date. He said that didn’t matter because the receipt was from 1996, and the handwriting on the back belonged to his father. I asked what his father had bought that day, and he told me the store’s old records were still in the basement because his family had never thrown them away. He said he’d check, but before hanging up he asked me one strange question: whether the wallet had contained anything belonging to my parents.
I didn’t know what he meant until I found an old photograph I’d forgotten about, tucked behind the license in the wallet I had replaced years ago. It was a picture of my mother and father standing outside a house I’d never recognized. I had kept it because it was one of the few photographs I had of them together, but I had never known where it was taken. I sent the man a copy, and within an hour he called me back. He said his father had kept a photograph almost identical to it, except there was someone else standing just outside the frame.
He asked me to come to the store, and when I arrived he took me into the back office and opened an old metal filing cabinet. Inside were carbon copies of receipts from the 1990s, including the one he’d found for me. His father had written a note beside it: the wallet had been brought into the store by a woman who asked him to keep it safe because she was afraid someone would find it. She had paid for something small, then asked him to put the receipt in an envelope and keep it until a person came looking for it.
The envelope had my name on it, but the date on the outside was twenty-eight years before I had ever seen the store. I opened it with shaking hands and found a second photograph, this one showing my mother much younger, standing beside the same house from the picture. On the back she had written only a date and one sentence: “If my child ever finds this, tell them the man who returned the wallet knew exactly where I was going.”
