She pissed
off waiters but the mailman adored her.
Her doctors stopped taking her calls but the gardener would bake her
banana bread. When I met people over the
past six weeks that knew my mother, they either rolled their eyes with unmasked
exasperation and said, “Oh, your mother,”
or they gave me a tight hug and said, “Oh,
your mother,” in a tone that is normally reserved for nuns and people who walk
on the moon.
She was a
study in contrasts.
A few days after her
death, my brother found her small wooden jewelry box in the dresser next to her bed. Inside was her vintage charm bracelet, her
great-grandmother’s pearls, and some silver coins from the 1950’s. My siblings and I divided up these items
according to sentimental value. My sister
Oakley looked overly-glamorous that afternoon wearing the pearls while changing the
cat’s litter box.
Imagine our
surprise a few weeks later to find a large steel safe in the back of my mother’s closet.
When had Mom
bought a safe?! How had none of us seen
it before? Why had she not told my
brother, nor given my sister a key or the combination? What
was in there?
After weeks
of cleaning and clearing out the house, the safe was one of the last things
left to deal with. We would need to open
it at some point.
I called a
locksmith. “What is involved with
breaking into a safe?” I heard myself ask on the phone. As the words escaped my lips, I
imagined the locksmith alerting the police moments after we hung up.
In the end,
my brother-in-law convinced us to save the $150 locksmith fee because he could
break in with a large drill. My siblings
and I stood around watching him for 20 minutes, his safety goggles flecked with
dust and specks of metal.
I found
myself wondering what my eccentric mother had hidden inside, her most precious and
treasured possession. Would it be a
gigantic file of previously unknown stocks worth billions? Her grandmother’s famous apple pie
recipe? The Hope Diamond? The number of a private Swiss bank
account? Keys to a secret Porsche parked
elsewhere? Photos of her puppy from childhood?
The tension
was palpable. I looked at my
sister. I looked at my brother. All the mysteries of my mother’s life were
about to be revealed to us when we would find out what mattered most.
My
brother-in-law slowly removed the safe’s heavy door. We leaned in.
For a moment, I was scared we might find a dead cat.
Oakley
reached in and pulled out a single piece of cardboard. Plain, brown, no writing.
We fell on
the floor laughing. We laughed until we
cried, my mother’s sense of humor reaching us from heaven.
MOV 
