Uncle Malcolm's Bag

“Jacob… Jacob!”

Shit! I sat up and rubbed the grit from my eyes. I hadn’t meant to fall asleep while Cassia was in the pool, not with my phone still open to the e-mail I’d received from my mother. Your great uncle Mack died on Tuesday and you’re his sole beneficiary. Be ready tomorrow at 10 and please wear a tie. Sole beneficiary to what, though? My grandfather’s oldest brother, Malcolm, had been in a nursing home for the last eight years of his life. As far as I knew, he didn’t own anything except a few changes of clothes and an old alarm clock that was only right twice a day. Every year my mother would offer to replace it for his birthday or Christmas, and every year he’d tell her that since his meals were brought to him it didn’t matter if he knew what time it was. He just liked the old clock even if it was broken. It reminded him of the one he had growing up. He always insisted he didn’t care about material things, but he sure would like it if we brought him a hot fudge sundae. We usually did, too, at least up until the last few months when he was barely eating and mostly didn’t recognize us anymore. Or he did, but thought we were my great-grandmother and grandfather, as he remembered them when he was younger. My father had stopped going with us, since he didn’t look like anyone in my mother’s family and his presence seemed to upset Uncle Mack.

My phone was still locked, face down on my chest with my hand over it. Good, Cassia hadn’t seen. We had only been dating for a couple of months, since shortly after Uncle Mack had started going downhill. I wrote a poem for English class about my sadness watching him struggle and my fear that the same would eventually happen to me. Cassia came up to me later that day, in the cafeteria, and told me it was the most moving thing she’d ever heard. She also told me that she’d recently broken up with her boyfriend and now didn’t have a date for prom, which was only three weeks away. Coincidentally, I also didn’t have a date, but in my case, it was because I’d never been on a date and didn’t know any girls well enough to be sure they’d say yes and not be super awkward about it afterwards. Now here was one of the prettiest girls in my class dropping hints that I should ask her, so of course I did.

Prom went fine, honestly. I might not have had a lot of experience with girls, but I’m also not one of those guys who has to show off or be the boss or anything like that. My friends wanted to help me come up with plans to make her fall desperately in love with me, and they couldn’t understand why I refused. Who wouldn’t want to go off to college knowing that they had a girl like that waiting for them to come home? “Like what?” I asked them. Tim cupped his hands in front of his chest while Jeff mimed a hair flip. I just rolled my eyes. “I barely know her. She’s cute, but I’m only going to prom with her because she liked my poem. I want college to be… an adventure, I don’t know. What’s the point of going away and then just come back here and have it all the same as when I just left high school?” So, we went, had fun, slow danced a bit. Somehow over the intervening weeks she had become my girlfriend instead of just a one-time date, but it felt weird, like we were always together but not really connecting in any meaningful way.

The truth was, I don’t know if she knew it before the day that she told me she liked my poem, but my backyard – with pool and a shed that we called our “cabana” – faced the backyard of a house that was rented by a group of guys attending SMU, where my dad taught. I tended to sunburn easily and usually just chilled in the “cabana” with my laptop, but Cassia said she loved swimming and spent most of her time in the pool or conspicuously sunbathing where the guys next door could easily see her. She hadn’t even asked about my own college plans – probably assumed that with my dad at SMU, that was where I was headed. But my dad had gotten his degree at Yale, and that was my plan as well. I didn’t bother mentioning that to her. I was thinking about just ghosting her, which I generally think is a shitty thing to do, but I didn’t think she’d really care that much once she got over the shock. As for Cassia, she kept talking about taking a “gap year” like some rich European kid, but she didn’t seem to have any plans for that time except to sit around at home thinking about what to do next.

I snapped back to the present, where my more-or-less girlfriend was telling me that she had to get home for supper. Something about celebrating her brother’s new job. I got off the couch, gave her a peck on the cheek, and went inside.

The next morning, I was ready early, hoping that I looked presentable in a clean white shirt, black jeans, skinny black tie, and blazer. Since my mom had to work that morning, she was planning to meet me at the lawyer’s office, meaning I got to drive myself in the G6 that I’d bought myself for my 17th birthday last year. I’d been saving all my money from mowing lawns and shoveling snow since I was ten years old and while it wasn’t the fanciest car – they’d stopped making them a few years back – it was what I’d always wanted and the one I got had belonged to a little old lady who barely drove it, so it was in great condition with low mileage. My friends, of course, thought I should have gotten a cooler car.

The only other person meeting us that morning was my grandfather’s youngest brother, Liam, Uncle Mack’s executor and now the only one living from that generation. Uncle Liam was the one who told Mom about the will, so although I wondered how he felt about being excluded, knowing that there wasn’t much meant he probably wasn’t too bothered by it.

Still, I was a bit surprised when the lawyer produced, as the lone item of my inheritance, a small black notebook. Well, that’s that, I thought to myself. I thanked the lawyer, shook Uncle Liam’s hand, hugged my mom, and drove home with the notebook on the passenger seat. When I got home, I went upstairs and flipped through it. Mostly, there were a lot of notes about birds – what they looked and sounded like, where he’d seen them, the dates, and times of day. Weird. I’d known Uncle Mack all his life and never knew he was a birder. I wondered why he’d thought that I would want this, since he had never gone out of his way to include me in this interest, and briefly considered that maybe I’d donate it to the Audubon Society or something. I started flipping through the book to see if there was anything else to it, and it looked like the last half of it might be blank. On the second-to-last page, though, there was an address and a string of numbers.

The address looked familiar, so I pulled it up on my laptop. Yes, it was the self-storage place next to the donut shop where I’d worked last summer. Were the numbers maybe a locker and combination? I got in the car and headed over, thinking to myself that it was probably full of more birding logs. The Audubon Society might be getting a bunch of data on the birds of southeastern Maine.

I found the storage locker attendant, explained who I was, and showed him my ID and the notebook. He recognized the handwriting immediately. “Yeah, hadn’t seen that guy in years, but the rent’s paid up. Got a bank check every December thirty-first for the whole next year. The rate went up in 2018 but the phone number we had for him was no good, so as long as he kept paying, we let it go. Sorry to hear he’s gone, but whatever’s in there is yours.” He walked me to the locker and left me to open it.

Inside, I found an old black duffel bag. It was completely covered in dust but otherwise in good condition. I vaguely remembered my mother talking about “Uncle Malcolm’s big black bag” a long time ago. This one was newer than the one she remembered, which she always said resembled an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. She and her cousins would tease each other about what was in the bag, or that it was even used to stuff misbehaving children into. He carried it everywhere with him and locked it up at night, but no one ever found out what was in it. I’d never seen it and assumed that whatever purpose it served, it was no longer needed, but here it was in a newer form. I knew Uncle Mack well enough that I doubted there was anything bad in there – in fact, it felt like it might have been the birding notebooks that I expected – but it still felt weird to open it right there, so I closed the locker and took the bag home.

When my mother got home, all she said was, “Well, I’ll be darned.” I had waited for her – it seemed only right that she should be there when we finally found out what was in Uncle Malcolm’s bag. She let me unzip it, and both of our jaws dropped when bundles of cash fell out. A quick count showed that I had a little over twenty thousand dollars. We stared at each other for a few minutes. “I don't know where all this came from, but what are you going to do with it, Jacob?”

I thought it over and remembered a long-ago conversation. “I’m going to put most of it aside for expenses at school, but I’ve still got a month before I have to be in New Haven. I think I’m gonna see if Tim and Jeff are still interested in our old plan to drive cross-country before we all go our separate ways.”

“How do you think Cassia’s going to take that?”

I thought about it for the briefest of moments and shrugged. “This was our idea way before I met her.” My mom knew. She smiled, and I went upstairs to call the guys.