Money Mystery Road Trip

I stare at the house from the driveway a good ten minutes before going in. This moment stung, of course, but it hurt far less than similar circumstances many years ago. I was tying up the loose ends of a loved one's final chapter, and this time it was a long novel, not a short story.

Walking through the front door a part of me expects him to holler “Hello Granddaughter” and I prepare myself for the flood of memories waiting on the other side. His comforting, old man cologne wafts towards me immediately. Tears well up quickly but so does a huge smile. He was the last of my immediate family and all I had wanted was for him to live a long, happy life. I wanted it for him and selfishly for myself on many levels. I wanted to see a loved one be blessed with growing old. He knew my wish, more like my demand. He must live into his 80’s, and he did. It had been decades since the last apple fell from our family tree and this time I could honestly celebrate the life of the person who passed without dwelling on the fact they didn’t get a decent lifespan. My grandpa had traveled extensively, had the idyllic wife and two kids, a dream career with a long and enjoyable retirement. There had been hardships, like in any life, but he was overall content. He even had the cliché dream ending and passed in his sleep after a peaceful day tinkering around on his property and fishin’, strong mind and body until the end.

I start separating his belongings, donate or keep, pausing frequently to gaze at family photos and flashing back to beautiful memories with a random memento in my hand. We weren’t close most of my 20’s, but sobriety led to a longing for familial connections so I started calling more and a friendship grew. My relationship with my grandmother had been effortless because she knew me better than I knew myself, plus we both had a quirky sense of humor. Grandpa was a different story, I loved him from day one, obviously, but we didn’t have deep conversations. He was the quiet, stoic, loyal family man who played with me as a child and taught me all kinds of interesting things, but he wasn’t one to talk about feelings. My grandmother’s funeral was the first time I saw him lose composer. Years later when I was 27 he shared his first personal fact with me, one of the most memorable days of my life. The best part of sobriety was getting close to him. Now as I clean his house I can hear twenty years worth of meaningful conversations playing back in my head and I’m grateful for every second.

Things moved slowly the first couple of days as I was enveloped in the past, by day three it was less emotionally taxing and more like a meaningful chore with brief strolls down memory lane. The reflective part of my brain was active as ever and it brought back random childhood inclinations, like my fascination with family secrets. As a kid, I loved old-timey books with stories of living on farms before electricity. They often slowly led up to a big revelation of family secrets. I don’t know why I always romanticized that notion. Personally, I’m an open book and dislike liars more than sitting on a thumbtack, but something about a mystery an ancestor figures out generations later is exhilarating.

I got a dose of how wild hearing a family secret could be when my grandfather found out at age 64 that he had a sister. Years before he'd became fascinated with our family history and joined a genetics website, he heavily researched old public records and wrote an impressive and surprisingly detailed account of our ancestors lives dating back to the 1800s. So you can imagine his surprise after all that research to find out he had a living sister the whole time. When their mother was in her late teens she had a child out of wedlock, commonplace today but unheard of back then. She gave the baby up and never told anyone. Someone encouraged my newfound great Aunt to join the genetics site at age 70, she went from knowing almost nothing to knowing her family history in great detail. It would be logical to think that was the big shocker I was waiting for, the mind-blowing family secret, but with this much time on my hands, I wonder if there was more. Maybe even something my grandpa didn’t know.

My curiosity was at a maximum by the time I reached the garage and saw storage containers with my grandma’s name on them. That secretly sentimental man had held on to her favorite dresses, wedding ring, and even some of her humorous decorations and beer cozies. There was even the book of clean jokes she bought when I was a kid because she didn’t know any PG-friendly ones. A small, black safe sat at the bottom of one of the totes, the key in the lock. Inside were seven little black notebooks. Intrigued and hungry, I grab the safe and head to the kitchen. With a steaming bowl of grandfather’s favorite soup, I plop down to explore the notebooks. They appear to be a cross between a journal and a day planner, containing a lot of shorthand and oddly seem like she was taking notes about her own life as if there’d be a quiz on the day’s occurrences. Most entries didn’t show my grandmother’s personality but it was still comforting thinking about my beloved grandmother going about the average day. There were notations of her family’s achievements, even though her kids were grown. She included everything my grandpa accomplished and even noted enjoyable days loved ones had. In typical style, she still had me laughing as she narrated her life. It had been decades, but it felt like my best friend was there, soothing my soul with her laugh through it all mentality.

A half a bag of chips and almost two notebooks later, I finally caught on to a weird trend in the notes. Almost every month there was a triangle above a square with a number in it, normally in the couple hundred range. At first, I thought I was reaching, making up some interesting mystery as a distractor from processing real emotions, but the possibility of it being true was too strong to ignore. My grandma taught me it’s easy to blindly trust those you love if you have a plan B in case they don’t love you back. What if this mentality led to a backup plan during a happy marriage? My grandma died unexpectedly so it’s not like she could give a deathbed confession about a squirrely stash of money. I grab a piece of paper and start noting each date the symbol appeared on. Over ten years of notes and not once did the symbol show up during the holiday months and it was normally a few weeks away from immediate family member's birthdays, sometimes skipping those months. She skipped three months before the special graduation trip she took me on to NYC. Knowing her she’d never put money aside instead of giving to her family, so this far-fetched suspicion seemed slightly less preposterous.

The clincher was the symbol itself. In my mind the view from those windows had grown hazy after all these years but now the symbol was looking like something I saw in countless family photos the past few days. My grandparents had a beach house my grandpa sold shortly after the accident. There was a family room upstairs with a wall consumed by two large windows, a triangle above a square. My grandmother had a crafting area in the room, so she spent a lot of time up there alone while my grandpa read or worked downstairs. I grab a photo album and fan through to a picture of the windows and see a heating vent on the ground. Partially wrapped up in the mystery and partially wanting an excuse to not work the rest of the night, I start fantasizing about how I’m going to ninja my way into a house without getting arrested to check a vent because my grandma wrote some numbers in her journal 20 years ago and what is the likely hood that a cop won’t think I’m on something if I do get caught. The best-case scenario would be a 51/50 but I’ve heard the food in jail and the mental health hospital is awful, so no, that’s out. I Google the beach house while I hypothesis ways of sweet-talking my way in without divulging they might be sitting on a tall stack of cash. My jaw drops. It’s a beachfront vacation rental now! Worst-case scenario upgraded to a nice little vacation. I book a stay a couple of weeks out and plan my money mystery road trip.

The greatly anticipated weekend arrives and the cars gassed up with a cute photo of my grandparents as youngins on my rearview. We are off! I reach the Texas coastline early afternoon, waves crash on golden sandy beaches as far as the eye can see. As my truck etches its way down the short stretch of Oceanside road, my mind trailed off. Would this just be a fun, spontaneous road trip? If there was money was it found long ago by a repairman or new owner? Did my grandpa know about the savings? Or most logically, is this just some silly fantasy, me reading too deeply into a shorthand journal with a wanna-be detective mindset from watching too much Dateline. Only time would tell and that timeline was getting shorter by the mile.

Upon reaching their old town, I speed through the neighborhood with adrenaline-fuelled anticipation vibrating through my entire body, hands slightly shaking. I park in the driveway catawampus like a mad man, throw it in park, haphazardly leaving the door open. I run to the house wide-eyed and grinning like a kid who spotted Santa. My hands tremble enough to delay entry as I fumble with the lockbox containing the key. Alas, I am inside and sprinting up the stairs. There it is, the windows and vent are patiently awaiting me. Screwdriver in hand, I scurry to the heating vent. Still smiling like a fool I remove each screw, one, two, three, hurry up number four!

I set the cover aside and reach into the dusty vent, collecting cobwebs as my arm swirls around. I hit something hard and out of place attached to the vent’s ceiling. With a strong tug, it comes loose. It’s a small black safe like the one at my grandpa’s but with a magnet attached to the top. Yet again the key is in the lock, as I turn it my heart drops, smile fades and eyes widen. I lift the lid and my smile returns with a vengeance. My seemingly far-fetched idea of what the symbol meant might just be proof of my everlasting connection with my grandma. She always got me, and apparently, I still got her.

The next hour I dedicate to creating neat little stacks on the dining room table, over the years she had put away a little over twenty thousand dollars. I think about all the times over the past two decades that I desperately needed that money, but I was no longer in that boat. It had always been her dream to go back to her childhood village in Mexico with a ton of money to help those left behind. Surely almost everyone she knew was gone at this point, but the village and its needs still remained. Looks like I have another road trip ahead of me.