I did not open the leather folder until the second day. I did not open it because I had decided, on the first day, that I would walk the cottage the way my grandmother had taught me to walk a house I had come back to, which was slowly, room by room, drawer by drawer, and that I would not, on the first day, open the leather folder a man I had met twice had handed me — because on the first day I still did not know enough about Lucas to know the right way to open what he had left me. The folder would wait. The folder had waited in the back pew of the church and it had waited on the table at the reception and it would wait, I decided, one more night, on the kitchen table beside the two envelopes I had not yet decided to act on.
The second day was a Tuesday. The rain had stopped in the night. The light that came in through the kitchen window on the morning of the second day had the clean, washed quality of lake light filtered through a long row of October maples — pale and flat, the color of cloth left in the water too long. I made tea. I stood at the sink and drank it the way I had stood at the sink and drunk it the day before, because I did not yet trust myself to sit. I was, I knew, a woman who would sit down and not get up again if she sat down too early in a house she had not been in for twelve years. So I did not sit down. I put the cup in the sink. I started at the front door and I worked my way, drawer by drawer, toward the back.
The cottage was small. The cottage had always been small. My grandmother had bought it in 1971 for thirty-eight thousand dollars, a fact she had told me exactly twice, once when I was twelve and had asked, and once when I was twenty-eight and had, on a phone call from Boston, said the wrong word about property taxes. The cottage had two bedrooms and one bathroom and a kitchen that doubled as a dining room and a back porch that doubled as a reading room and a small stone foundation that, my grandmother had told me, was the oldest stone foundation in Marble Cove and had been laid, according to the man who had sold her the cottage, by a person whose name had been lost to the records of 1798. The man who had sold her the cottage had also told her, on the day of the sale, that the cottage had been built for a woman whose husband had been lost at sea in the year the foundation was laid, and that the woman had lived in it for the rest of her life, and that she had been, in the words the man had used, the house. I had, when I was twelve, asked my grandmother what the man had meant. My grandmother had said, He meant she stayed. I had not, until the second day, thought about that sentence in a long time.
I worked my way through the cottage. The front bedroom, my grandmother's, had been left the way she had kept it for the last forty years, which was the way a woman who had been widowed at thirty-eight and who had decided not to marry again, kept a bedroom she slept in alone. The bed was made. The quilt was the same quilt, in the same pattern of small blue and white squares, that had been on the bed the summer I was eleven and that had been on the bed the summer I was nineteen and that had been on the bed the summer I had decided, at twenty, that I did not need to come back. The reading glasses were on the nightstand in the place she had always put them. The amber bowl of paper clips was empty. The drawer with the folded paper that said my name was still closed. I did not open it. I had decided, on the first day, that the drawer would wait until I had walked the cottage. I had decided, on the second day, that the drawer would wait until I had walked the cottage and the property.
The second bedroom, the smaller one, had been mine. It had been kept, by whoever had kept it, in a state that was neither mine nor not-mine. The bed was made with sheets that were not the sheets I had slept in as a child. The bookshelf had been emptied of my books and filled with books I did not recognize, mostly paperbacks with cracked spines and small notes in the margins in a hand that was not my grandmother's. The window had been replaced. The window had been replaced with a window of the same dark wood, but the latch on the window was a different latch, a brass latch I did not recognize. I did not, at first, know who had put the books on the shelf or who had replaced the window or who had made the bed. I found out, later in the day, that the books and the window and the bed had all been the work of the woman who had cut the lavender for the grave, Helen, who had, in the last year of my grandmother's life, been coming in twice a week to help with the heavier things and who had decided to keep my room in the way she had decided to keep the lavender.
The bathroom was the bathroom I had remembered. The bathtub was the same iron tub with the same chipped enamel on the left side. The mirror was the same small mirror that had, for forty years, been held to the wall by a single nail that my grandfather had driven with the wrong-sized hammer and that had never sat flat. I looked at the mirror. The mirror looked back at me in the way the mirror had always looked back at me, which was the way a small, slightly crooked mirror in a small, slightly crooked bathroom looks back at a woman whose grandmother has just been buried. The woman in the mirror was, I decided, the woman who would have to do for the second day too.
The kitchen was where I spent the rest of the morning. I went through the drawers one at a time, in the order my grandmother had taught me to go through drawers, which was the order of the cooking she had done in them. The cutlery drawer first, then the tea drawer, then the linen drawer, then the drawer with the pens and the stamps and the small amber bowl that was, I knew, the bowl the paper clips had been moved from. I went through the cutlery drawer. The cutlery was the cutlery she had had for forty years. I went through the tea drawer. The tea was the tea she had had for forty years, except for one small tin at the back of the drawer that I did not recognize, a tin with no label, a small tin I would have thought nothing of in another house, and that, in this house, I looked at for a longer moment than I meant to. I put it back. I went through the linen drawer. The linen was the linen she had had for forty years. I went through the pens and stamps drawer. The pens and the stamps were the pens and the stamps she had had for forty years.
It was in the back of the linen drawer that I found the loose floorboard.
The linen drawer had a false bottom. The linen drawer had had a false bottom for as long as I could remember. My grandmother had told me about the false bottom when I was eleven and had asked her why the drawer did not close all the way. She had told me it was so she could keep the small valuables she did not want to put in the bank. She had told me the valuables were not worth worrying about. She had told me the valuables were a few pieces of jewelry that had belonged to my grandfather's mother and that she did not wear and did not want to insure. She had told me, on the day she had told me this, that I was not to open the false bottom without her. I had not opened it. I had not, in twenty years, thought about opening it. I was not, on the second day, intending to open it. I was only intending to lift the linen to see whether the drawer had been cleaned underneath, because Helen had been cleaning the cottage and Helen would, I knew, have cleaned the linen drawer.
I lifted the linen. The false bottom of the drawer was a single board of old pine, old pine that had been in a house long enough to have taken on the color of the house. The board had a small round hole drilled near the back, drilled when she wants to put a finger in and lift the board out. I put my finger in the hole. I lifted the board. The board came up easily. The board had been lifted, I could tell by the way it moved, many times in the months before I had come. Under the board, where the valuables should have been, there was no jewelry. There was no jewelry and there was no small leather pouch and there was no envelope of insurance papers. There was, in the space under the board, a single object.
The object was a tin box. The tin box was the size of a hardcover book and the weight of a hardcover book and the color of a tin that has been buried for a long time, which is the color of tin that has been kept, for a long time, in a place where the air does not move. The box had no label. The box had a small hasp at the front, and the hasp was closed, and the hasp was closed with a small brass clasp that had been, I saw when I turned the box over, locked with a small brass key that was tied to the clasp with a piece of kitchen string. The string was the kitchen string my grandmother had used to tie up her tomato plants every summer.
On the top of the tin box, in the center, in the hand I knew better than I knew my own, my grandmother had written four words. The words were remember the bloodline. The words were not a warning. The words were not a threat. The words were written in the hand I knew — written the way she had written them many times before, in that same place, and had decided, on this final time, to write them as they ought to be written.
I did not open the box. I had decided, before I had lifted the board, that I would not, on the second day, open the box. The box would wait. The box had been waiting under the linen drawer since some summer I had not been here for, and the box would wait one more night, on my grandmother's kitchen table, beside the leather folder from Lucas Marsh and the two envelopes I had not yet decided to act on.
I sat down. I had not, since I had come to Marble Cove, sat down at the kitchen table. I had been afraid to sit. I had been afraid that if I sat down at the kitchen table I would become, in the way a person becomes when she sits down at a table she has been told to sit at, a person who would not get up again. I sat down. The chair took me the way the chair takes a person who has been standing for a long time and who has finally, at the end of the standing, decided to let the chair have her. I sat for a long time. The tin box was on the table. The leather folder was on the table. The two envelopes were on the table. The kettle was on. The radio was playing, very softly, the piece I did not know the name of, in the key I did not know the name of. The kitchen light over the sink, the small light my grandmother had been meaning to replace for ten years, came on by itself, all the way on, the way it had come on the night before. I did not get up to turn it off. I did not get up at all. I sat at the table and the box and the folder and the envelopes sat with me and the kitchen light over the sink stayed on and the morning went on, quiet and pale, the way October mornings in this kitchen had always gone on.
I opened the leather folder. The leather folder contained a single sheet of cream card stock and a small manila sub-envelope. The sheet of cream card stock was a letter on the letterhead of Mercer, Calder & Whittaker, Attorneys at Law, Marble Cove and Boston. The letter was, I saw, a different letter from the one in the white envelope I had read on the first day. This letter was addressed to me at the cottage. The letter was dated the day after the funeral. The letter was signed, in the same small precise hand, by a man named Theodore Mercer. The letter asked me, in the lawyer when he is asking a woman he has not yet met to do him the professional courtesy of coming to see him, to make an appointment at his office in Marble Cove at my earliest convenience to review, in person, the documents my grandmother had placed in his care. The letter said that the documents pertained to the disposition of the cottage, its contents, and certain obligations of the estate that he was not, in this letter, at liberty to specify. The letter said that he had known my grandmother for nineteen years. The letter said that he had regarded her with the highest professional and personal regard. The letter did not mention the manila envelope. The letter did not mention the figure of one million four hundred thousand dollars. The letter underlined the word earliest in the same small neat line the lawyer had underlined it in the first letter. The letter was, in every respect, a polite letter from a man who had been told to write a polite letter.
I set the letter down. I opened the manila sub-envelope. The sub-envelope contained a single business card. The card was heavy cream stock. The card said, in a small precise font:
Theodore Mercer Mercer, Calder & Whittaker Marble Cove and Boston (508) 555-0117
On the back of the card, in pencil, in my grandmother's hand, was a single short line, the same short line she had drawn under the Calder in the firm name on the first letter. The line was not under any word. The line was drawn in the blank white space on the back of the card, in the place where a person who is thinking about something she does not yet want to write down writes a placeholder to come back to. I turned the card over. I turned it back. I put it on the table beside the letter. The kitchen light over the sink stayed on.
I did not open the tin box. I did not, on the second day, open the tin box. I had decided, before I had lifted the board, that I would not, on the second day, open it, because I had decided that the second day would be the day I walked the cottage, and that the third day would be the day I walked the property, and that the fourth day would be the day I opened the tin box, because my grandmother had taught me that a person does not open a box she has been left until she has first walked the house the box is in and the land the house is on, because the house and the land are the only way a person has of knowing whether she is the person the box was left for.
I got up. I put the kettle on again. I drank another cup of tea standing at the sink. I looked at the tin box. The tin box was, on the table, in the place where my grandmother had always put the thing she was not yet ready to open. The kettle whistled. I turned off the burner. The morning light came in through the kitchen window at the angle it had come in through the kitchen window for forty years, and the light fell across the tin box and the light fell across the brass clasp and the light fell across the four words my grandmother had written on the top of the box, and the words were remember the bloodline, and the words were, in the kitchen light of the second day, the words she had written and not a word more.
I put the box back in the linen drawer. I put the linen back over the board. I closed the drawer. I put the leather folder and the card and the two envelopes back on the kitchen table in the order my grandmother had put things on the kitchen table when she had been working through a problem, which was the order of the problem itself, with the thing she was about to act on in the center and the things she was still deciding on at the sides. I put the box at the center, even though the box was in the drawer, because the box was the center of the problem even when the box was not on the table. I put the lawyer's letter on the left. I put the manila envelope on the right. I put the leather folder underneath, because the leather folder was the thing Lucas Marsh had handed me, and Lucas Marsh was a man I had met twice, and a man I had met twice went, in my grandmother's kitchen, underneath the things that were still being decided.
I put the cup in the sink. I went out the back door. I walked the property the way I had decided I would walk the property on the second day, which was the way my grandmother had taught me to walk property, which was the way you walk a piece of land when the piece of land has been, for forty years, in the hands of a person who knew it better than she knew her own face.
The back porch had been swept. Helen had swept the back porch. The rocking chair was where it had been, with the folded blanket on it. The lavender was gone. The lavender had been cut. There were, in the place where the lavender had been, the small dry stubs of last year's stems, cut low and clean the way Helen cut them — close to the ground, with a hand sickle, in the September before the first frost.
The garden beyond the porch was the garden I had not walked in for twelve years. The garden had been, in the years I had known it, a garden that grew rhubarb and tomatoes and the small blue potatoes my grandmother had roasted every Sunday of October. The garden had been, in the year I had last walked it, a garden that had been overtaken by the lavender and by the long grass at the back of the property and by the small wild rose that grew, every summer, against the stone foundation at the back of the cottage. The garden was, in October of this year, the same garden. The rhubarb was gone. The tomatoes were gone. The small blue potatoes had been, I knew, dug by Helen in late summer, the way my grandmother had always asked Helen to dig the small blue potatoes in late summer. The lavender was gone. The long grass at the back was, in October, the long dry grass that has been cut once and left to lie, and that makes, when you walk through it, the small dry sound of a person walking through the long dry grass of a property she has come home to.
The stone foundation at the back of the cottage was the stone foundation the man who had sold my grandmother the cottage had told her was the oldest stone foundation in Marble Cove. The foundation was, on the second day, the foundation I remembered. The small wild rose had grown, in twelve years, up to the second course of stones. The rose had, in October, no flowers. The rose had the small red hips that grow on wild roses in October, and the hips were, I saw, the small red hips that my grandmother had cut, every October, and put in a small glass jar on the kitchen windowsill, because she had told me, once, that the hips were for tea and that the tea was for the long winter.
I did not cut the hips. I did not, on the second day, cut the hips, because I had decided, before I had come out the back door, that the hips would wait until the fourth day, when I had opened the tin box. The hips were, in the order of the property, the next thing — the thing that came after the tin box had been opened and the lawyer had been called and the polite man had been seen, the thing that went on the windowsill when the jar was finally allowed to be full again.
I walked the rest of the property. I walked the long side, where the small wooden fence my grandfather had built in 1973 had been replaced, in twelve years, with a fence of the same dark wood and the same weathered nails, by a woman who had decided that the fence my grandfather had built should not be allowed to fall down. I walked the short side, where the maple my grandmother had planted in 1975 had grown, in twenty-nine years, into a tree whose lowest branch was at the height of the second story of the cottage, and that was, in October, the color of old gold against a gray sky, the lowest branch at the height of the second story, the leaves already half-turned on the gravel drive below. I walked the front, where the gravel crescent was the gravel crescent I had parked on the day before, and where the small ceramic chip in the shape of a heron was the small ceramic chip my grandmother had glued onto the mailbox in 1981, and where the wooden arm of the mailbox was bent the same way and the latch that did not work did not work the same way.
I went back inside. I put the kettle on. I drank another cup of tea standing at the sink. The kitchen light over the sink was still on. The light did not flicker. It sat in the corner of the kitchen the way a lamp sits in the corner of a room that has been lived in too long to need to ask for anything. I did not turn it off.
I sat down. I had decided, before I had sat down, that the sitting would be the last thing I did on the second day. I would sit at the kitchen table with the tin box in the linen drawer and the leather folder on the table and the lawyer's card on the table and the two envelopes on the table and the small dry sound of the long grass still in my ears and the small red hips of the wild rose still in my eyes, and I would sit until I had decided what the second day had been for.
The second day had been, I decided, for walking. The second day had been for walking the cottage the way my grandmother had taught me to walk a house, and for walking the property the way my grandmother had taught me to walk a piece of land. The second day had not been for opening the tin box. The second day had not been for opening the leather folder. The second day had not been for opening the two envelopes I had read on the first day. The second day had been for the small ceramic chip in the shape of a heron and the wooden arm of the mailbox and the long dry grass and the small red hips and the linen drawer and the false bottom and the tin box with the four words on the top and the brass clasp and the kitchen string. The second day had been for the second day.
I would call the lawyer on the third day. I would call the lawyer on the third day because the third day would be the day I had decided to begin, and beginning, in the order of my grandmother's cottage, meant calling the polite man before the impolite company, and calling the polite man meant dialing the number on the small cream card with the small precise font and the small neat underline on the back.
The kitchen light over the sink stayed on. The radio in the kitchen window was playing, very softly, a piece I did not know the name of, in a key I did not know the name of, and the piece went on, unbroken, into the second-day quiet of the kitchen. The tin box was in the linen drawer. The leather folder was on the table. The two envelopes were on the table. The small cream card was on the table. The wild rose hips were, in the small glass jar my grandmother had put on the kitchen windowsill in every October of my memory, the small red hips — not yet cut, not yet in the jar, still on the rose, waiting. The hips were not in the jar. The jar was empty. I did not, on the second day, cut the hips. I would cut them on the fourth day, when the tin box had been opened and the lawyer had been called and the polite man had been seen and the impolite company had been answered. I would cut them then. The hips would wait. The hips had been waiting, in the order of the wild rose, since some October I had not been here for, and the hips would wait, in the empty jar on the kitchen windowsill, until the fourth day, when I had decided what the fourth day would be for.
I got up. I turned off the kitchen light. The light turned off the way a light turns off when a hand has been waiting, for a long time, to be given permission to turn it off. I went to bed. I did not, on the second night, sleep in my grandmother's bed. I slept, instead, on the small couch in the back porch, with the folded blanket from the rocking chair over me, and the small dry sound of the long grass still in my ears, and the small red hips of the wild rose still in my eyes, and the four words my grandmother had written on the top of the tin box still on the inside of my eyelids, in her hand, in the place where a person keeps a thing she is not yet ready to read. Outside, in the long dry grass at the back of the property, something small moved once, and was still, and was not the wind, and was not a person, and was, in the way a thing is when it is being asked to wait, waiting.
