Then my mother glanced toward the hallway and sighed.
“There’s the wardrobe in your father’s workroom,” she said. “If you want something.”
Something.
The way she said it, you would have thought she was offering me a broken toaster.
The wardrobe stood in the back room off the garage, where Dad used to keep tools, fishing rods, tarps, paint cans, and all the small stubborn things that made up a working man’s life. It was red, or had been once. Now the paint was chipped and peeling in strips, the left door hung a little crooked, and one back leg had been propped up for years with a brick wrapped in duct tape. It smelled faintly of sawdust, damp wood, and the peppermint lozenges Dad kept in his coat pocket.
Sarah laughed when she saw me looking at it.
“Oh, Daniel,” she said. “Please don’t tell me you’re actually taking that.”
Michael gave a low chuckle from the doorway. “Let him. He always liked rescuing junk.”
My mother didn’t laugh.
That was the first thing I noticed.
She stood behind them with one hand pressed against her stomach and the other gripping the frame of the door. Her mouth had gone tight on one side, the way it did whenever something didn’t move according to her plan.
For most of my life, my mother had never needed to raise her voice to make a room obey her. She could destroy a person with a church-lady smile and a sentence soft enough to put on a sympathy card. She called it keeping peace. In our family, keeping peace usually meant everybody else got what they wanted and I kept quiet about who paid for it.
I looked at the wardrobe again.
Dad had never let anyone touch it.
