The barn on my mother’s place had a chain and padlock on it since before she died, and I never had a key. We’re outside Sikeston, Missouri. She always said it was full of Daddy’s junk and not worth the trouble. In April, a man from the co-op called about a bill for stored equipment, and I told him we didn’t store anything. He said the account had been active since 2004. I got the bolt cutters and went out there on a Saturday. It wasn’t junk. The floor was swept, there was a 1994 Chevy truck under a tarp with only forty thousand miles on it, and there was a workbench with tools laid out in neat rows.
There was a cot against the back wall with a blanket folded at the end and a Bible sitting on an overturned crate. The Bible had a name written inside the front cover in pencil, and it wasn’t my daddy’s. My daddy died in 1988, and the truck was from 1994. I called the co-op and asked whose name was on the storage account. The woman read it back to me, and the name matched the Bible. Then she said the account had been opened in 2004 and that every invoice had been paid on time. The mailing address on every one was my mother’s house, and she’d lived there until she died.
I asked her to tell me when the last payment had been made. She said it was three weeks ago. I stood there looking at the cot and the truck and realized somebody had been coming into that locked barn recently. I called the sheriff, and while we waited, I opened the truck’s glove box. There was an envelope inside with my mother’s handwriting on it. It had never been mailed. Inside was a photograph of my mother standing beside the same truck, dated 1994. On the back she’d written one sentence: “If he ever comes back, don’t tell him I died.”
