The brown cardboard box on the yellow linoleum floor was already half full of mismatched jelly glasses and chipped coffee mugs. My brother, Russell, taped the bottom of another box with two quick, loud jerks of his hand. He was fifty-two now, his hair thinning at the crown, but he still moved with the same hurried precision he used at his logistics job in Memphis.
“We need to be out of here by Tuesday,” Russell said, checking his gold wristwatch.
I reached up to the very top shelf of the pantry, past the expired cans of chicken broth and the glass jars of preserved peaches. My fingers touched the cold metal of Mama’s blue-rimmed enamel flour tin. It had sat in that exact spot since nineteen eighty-four, the year the county paved our road.
It did not slide easily when I pulled. It was far too heavy for a tin that was supposed to be empty, and something inside gave a dull, metallic thud against the wall of the container. I had to use both hands, my fingers catching on the sticky layer of kitchen grease that had settled on the lid over forty years.
“Leave the dry goods,” Russell said, without looking up from his tape dispenser. “The food bank won’t take open flour, Linda.”
“Mama didn’t keep flour in this one,” I said, rubbing the stiff muscle in my left thigh where the bone had broken thirty years ago. “She kept her recipe cards in here.”
I set the tin on the formica counter, and the weight of it rattled the silverware drawer underneath.
“What’s in there?” Russell asked, his short sentence landing in the small kitchen.
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
I pried the metal lid off with the edge of a butter knife. It popped with a sharp scent of old iron and basement air, a smell that belonged to the years before Wayne died, when the house was damp and nobody painted the porch.
Inside, there was no white powder, only a thick layer of grey wax paper folded into a neat square. Beneath the paper, green bills were packed tight, bound with thick red rubber bands that had begun to melt and stick to the paper.
