Chapter 2: The Glovebox
Sam drove us home with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.
The pickup rattled over the bridge into town. Main Street was closed up for the night: the bakery, the hardware store, the old Ashgrove Mill with its brick smokestack, the hospital up on the hill where I’d worked twelve years of night shifts.
“Who was that man?” I said.
“What man?”
“Sam. I saw you. At the end of the driveway. He called you Mr. Whitcombe.”
His hands tightened on the wheel. “He’s a client. An old guy from Columbus. I do some work for his family.”
“At eight o’clock on a Saturday? In a three-piece suit?”
“Holly.” He glanced at me. His gray eyes looked tired in the dashboard light. “Can we talk about this tomorrow? Please. Tonight was a lot.”
I let it go. That’s what we do in my family. We let things go until they go bad.
Here’s what you need to know about my family. My father left when I was nine, and he took the savings with him. My mother spent the next three years cleaning other people’s houses, and then she married Gary, who owned four car dealerships and liked his dinner at six sharp. She never stopped telling me and Courtney what that taught her. Love doesn’t pay the electric bill.
Courtney listened. I didn’t.
When Sam and I got married at the county courthouse, Mom wore black. She said it was slimming. Courtney didn’t come at all. She had a spin class she couldn’t miss, and she sent a toaster with the receipt still in the box.
I met Sam six years ago when the hospital’s boiler died in January and the facilities company sent a guy who actually knew what he was doing. He fixed it in four hours in a freezing basement and then fixed the vending machine on his way out because a nurse had lost a dollar in it. That nurse was me.
He took me to the diner on our first date and asked me questions for two hours and actually listened to the answers. He builds birdhouses. He reads history books in the bath. He shovels Mrs. Delgado’s walk every winter without being asked.
We clip coupons. We have one retirement account, and it’s mine. Last year, when the truck needed a new transmission, Sam did it himself over three weekends because we didn’t have the eighteen hundred dollars.
At least, I thought we didn’t.
He fell asleep on the couch around midnight, still in his jacket. I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing it. Good night, Mr. Whitcombe. The way the old man held the car door.
At one in the morning, I went out to the truck in my slippers.
I’m not proud of it. Six years, and I’d never once gone through his things. I told myself I was looking for my sunglasses.
The glovebox stuck, the way it always does. I hit it with the heel of my hand, and it fell open.
The leather folder was inside.
Under it was a letter on thick cream paper, folded once. The letterhead was an engraved green oak tree and two words I’d seen my whole life on the side of the mill, on the bank building, on the sign at the public beach.
ASHGROVE HOLDINGS.
I unfolded it under the dome light.
Re: Lakeshore Pointe land lease. As sole owner of Ashgrove Holdings, your signature is required to approve or deny the attached application.
It was addressed to Mr. Samuel Whitcombe.
And at the bottom, in blue ink, someone had added a note by hand.
Sam, your grandfather would be proud of how you’ve kept it. A.B.
