My mother threw my house keys down a storm drain in front of my kids. She’d been standing in my driveway for ten minutes telling me I’d made a mistake. I told her she could say it inside or not at all, and I handed her the keys to hold while I got the groceries. She walked eleven feet and dropped them through the grate. “Now you’ll have to ask me for something,” she said.
My daughter was nine and my son was thirteen, and they were both standing at the front door watching. Before I could say anything, a neighbor I’d never properly met came across the street with a flashlight and a magnet on a string. He lay flat on the pavement and started working the magnet through the grate. My mother told him to mind his own business. He didn’t answer her. He just kept lowering the string until he felt it catch.
He pulled the keys up and handed them to me without saying a word. Then he looked at my mother and asked whether she was the woman who had been coming to my house every Thursday. She said yes, and he nodded like that confirmed something. He told me he’d noticed her car outside my house several times before, usually when I wasn’t home. I asked why he’d been watching, and he said he hadn’t been watching her. He’d been watching the house.
Then he reached into his pocket and handed me a small envelope. He said he’d found it behind his own mailbox three weeks earlier, with my address written on it. Inside was a photocopy of a document with my mother’s signature at the bottom. I recognized the signature, but not the document. My mother went completely silent when she saw it. The neighbor looked at me and said, “She didn’t come here because she wanted you to change your mind about the house. She came because she was trying to find out whether you’d already found what your father left behind.”
