“The lawyer said there was no bankbook, Uncle David,” I said, looking at the empty jewelry box on her nightstand.
“The lawyer doesn’t know how she lived,” he said, stepping over to the closet and pulling down a stack of cardboard hatboxes. “A woman who washed out her paper napkins and dried them on the radiator didn’t just throw away forty years of social security checks.”
I moved to the small oak nightstand where her ceramic sugar bowl sat, the one painted with blue cornflowers that she used for her morning tea.
Inside, under three old peppermint candies sticky with age, my fingers hit something small and metallic.
I pulled out a small, rusted iron key, no longer than my pinky finger, its edge rough with orange scaling.
“What did you find there?” David asked, turning from the closet with a stack of old woolen blankets in his arms.
“Just some old hard candy,” I said, slipping the small key into my coat pocket before he could look closer.
