Boxed In

“What time do you think you’ll get here?”

I looked down at my watch, then through the front window of the car ahead.

“I don’t know, maybe 5 minutes, maybe a few more. There’s a lot of traffic right now,”

I sighed. I didn’t want to go.

We were close. A little close. Okay, maybe not close at all. She wouldn’t have cared, would she?

“I’ll be there soon,” I responded and hung up the phone.

Either way, if I didn’t show up, it wouldn’t be her I was disappointing. I wanted to cry; cry for her, cry for me and badly, but couldn’t find it in me.

I arrived, 6.5 minutes late, but still calm and dashing. That’s important. I peered past four guests and finally saw Stacy. The social butterfly; her eyes fluttered like an actual butterfly when speaking to anyone in her general vicinity. Her blonde mane glistened under the sun. Her appearance was practically aspirational - to many at least. I threw in the towel at around age 8 and haven’t looked back since.

Looking at both of us, you would hardly believe we were sisters.

“Erika,” she smiled my way, “you made it”.

Stacy was never caught publicly somber, not even at her mother’s own funeral.

“I’m glad I made it too,” I sure as hell didn’t want to be there and after years of addiction and two more of recovery, I was expected to show up at least two hours late, if at all. In the past, the stigma of being “the family addict” would have left me in a shame spiral too dizzying for me to even show up. Yet today, here I was, glowing, if only briefly before the tears set in.

20 minutes later I hear the priest's baritone voice cut through my thoughts, “And now her loving family will give their final farewells”. The music was subtle and not overbearing. It provided the kind of comfort many of us needed. As I walked past my mother’s open casket, I leaned over, “Everything’s okay. It will be okay”. Relief finally swelled over me and I clasped my eyes shut before telling her I loved her.

After about another hour, I was finally able to catch up with Stacy again.

“Thanks for hosting this with Uncle Ted. She would have loved it and I know how close you two were. No one could have done a better job than you,” I said through a few solitary drops of remaining tears.

“I’ll probably stop by the storage unit tonight. I have time. Once I pick up whatever she left me, I just leave the keys in the unit behind me. I forgot what some of the items were.” I told Stacy.

Stacy’s eyes glazed over her copy of the will and fistful of documents; “Okay great. There wasn’t much. I know she wanted you to have her jewelry box, that chair you always loved, the storage box of your baby items, and the stool box.”

That fucking stool box; not the old ruddy box we always kicked around in the kitchen. Why is she giving me that?

“Okay, thanks for letting me know. I should have everything out by tonight. If I have any questions I’ll let you know. Also, text me later this week, your umbrella is still in the apartment.”

We exchanged pleasant goodbyes. It was all soothingly pleasant.

____________________________________________________

The walls shook and chips of paint fell as the door of the storage unit rolled to the ceiling.

I lifted the chair from it’s delicate arms after brushing the dust off it’s velvet lining. She told me dad gave it to me. Dad didn’t talk much, but I took her word for it. She said it was the throne for his little princess. There were countless birthday photos of me in it and late nights with my teenage friends. For the first time since the funeral earlier that day, my tears started to burst in a stream. All of those tightly condensed memories weren’t just in my heart anymore, they were right in front of me.

Finally, I got around to picking up the stool box. As children, Stacy and I called it the stool box because it was the only thing she ever let us stand on. It was thrown around ceaselessly and frequently repurposed during moves. I often wondered why she even kept it. During the drive home, I felt it rattle around the trunk of the car and wondered what was actually inside it.

After heating up dinner in the microwave, I took to peeling off the brown paper it was wrapped in. Beneath the brown paper, there was a cardboard box and an only slightly smaller wooden box inside that one. Inside it, there was nothing but a stack of letters, an envelope of dried flowers, and a pair of earrings in it that looked practically new. What the hell is all this?

Sifting through the letters I didn’t recognize the handwriting. Two of them there were addressed from mom’s college friend Ethan. I remembered meeting him twice at family parties. He was a humble, yet handsome man two years mom’s junior. I remember him always smiling, he seemed nice. I picked up the second one. It was thickest of all the 40 letters.

“I miss you,” blah, blah, blah……I brushed over some stories he told reminiscing about a vacation they took that I knew nothing about. After an update of his travels he asked her, “Will Erika ever know, will she ever know she’s mine?”

I felt my shoulders drop and read two more of the letters. My dad knew, he just didn’t care. After gently folding the letters back into their envelopes and placing all of them into a larger envelope, I threw away the box.

I made a cup of coffee and I sat on the porch. It wasn’t raining, but the air was cool.

I watched the sunset behind pink clouds and smiled.