The Last Box in Unit 14

I'm Denise Cameron, I'm forty-three years old, and that Saturday I was parked outside Storage King with a trunk full of my ex-husband's garbage. I slammed the trunk so hard the whole car rocked. Well, good. Let it rock. Let the whole world know how I felt about Richard Cameron and his ten years of bullshit.

"Lying son of a..." I muttered, hauling out the first box. It was heavier than I expected, full of his old bowling trophies, and I nearly dumped it on the asphalt. Saved it at the last second. Some part of me still saved his stuff from harm, and that part of me needed to be fired.

I got the roll-up door open on Unit 14 and the fluorescent light inside buzzed like it was annoyed to see me. Fair enough. The place smelled like dust and concrete and somebody else's cigarettes. I'd been renting it three months now, ever since the divorce papers went through, and it was packed floor to ceiling with the wreckage of my marriage. Old furniture. Boxes of who knows what. A treadmill Richard bought and used twice.

I set the box down and went back for the next one. That's when the guy from the next unit appeared. Hal, I'd learned. I'd seen him last weekend, a tall man in his late forties, gray coming in at the temples, always moving like he had all the time in the world.

He was wrestling a sofa that clearly did not want to be wrestled. He had one end, the sofa had the other, and the sofa was winning.

"Looks like we're both having a great Saturday," he said, dry as the concrete under our feet.

I laughed before I could stop myself. I nearly dropped the box I was carrying, a box of photo albums I'd been avoiding for two months. It tipped in my arms and I caught it against my hip.

"Don't laugh at me," I said. "You're the one losing to a couch."

"Technically we're negotiating," he said. "It's a process. The sofa and I have an understanding."

"And what's the understanding?"

"It goes in the unit and I pretend I'm going to use it in the new apartment." He finally shoved the thing through his door and stood up straight, breathing hard but acting like he wasn't. "Hal," he said, offering a hand.

"I know. Denise. We've done the hallway nod a couple times now."

"We have. Very advanced nodding. Last weekend it was a full hello." He wiped his hands on his jeans. "Moving from Ohio, in case you're wondering why a grown man owns this much furniture."

"Fifty boxes of a dead marriage, in case you're wondering why a grown woman is swearing at a storage unit."

"That's a lot of boxes," he said, and his voice carried something, not pity, more like recognition. "I won't ask."

"Good. Because I'd tell you, and then you'd be here all day."

I went back to work. He went back to work. That's how it went for the first hour, the two of us sorting through our separate piles of junk with one thin wall of nothing between us. He unpacked kitchenware, wrapping paper everywhere, setting plates down on a folding table like they were museum pieces. I dug into my boxes with less patience.

Sorting through ten years of marriage has a particular quality. You don't find your stuff. You find his stuff. His stuff is everywhere. It's in your boxes. It's under your stuff. It's woven into everything like a hair in soup.

And that's when I pulled it out. The framed diploma. Ohio State, 2001, Richard Alan Cameron, Bachelor of Science. Big gold seal. Cheap black frame that he'd hung in three different home offices across three different states, and I'd been the one to put the nail in the wall every single time.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," I said.

Hal looked over. "Problem?"

"He hid his diploma in a box of my Christmas decorations. My decorations, Hal. The man hid his diploma in the one box he knew I'd never open, because I would have to look at a picture of my mother." I held it up. "Do you see this? Bachelor of Science in Being a Lying Bastard."

"That's a very competitive program," he said.

I laughed, and it came out half a sob, which embarrassed me, so I covered it with more laughing. "Sorry. God. Sorry. You don't need this."

"It's fine," he said, setting down a wrapped plate. "Really. You want to know what's in my boxes? My ex-wife took the house and I took everything she didn't want, so every box I open is basically a list of things she hated. Waffle iron. She hated the waffle iron. Kept it anyway."

"Why?"

"Petty," he said. "Purely petty. It's a great waffle iron, but that's maybe ten percent of the reason."

"So what happened with yours?" I asked, then winced. "Sorry, that's none of my..."

"No, it's fine. She met someone at work. Two years ago. I did the dignified thing and moved across the country to be near my daughter and my grandkid." He said it evenly, no anger in it, and I envied that a little. "Some days the dignified thing is also just running away. Hard to tell the difference."

"Richard didn't meet anyone at work," I said. "Or he did, I don't actually care. What I care about is that he lied to my face for a year and a half and I furnished his entire affair apartment, Hal. I picked out the couch. I picked out the throw pillows. I have excellent taste in throw pillows and I hate that I know where they live now."

"That's a specific nightmare."

"I have specific nightmares. I'm a very thorough person." I looked at the diploma. "What do I even do with this? I can't throw away a diploma, that feels like throwing away his whole college. But I'm not hanging it up. I'm not keeping it in the house. I'm not keeping it in this unit, because this unit is supposed to be purged by Labor Day."

"Why Labor Day?"

"Because I said so. It's my revenge calendar. Everything of his gone by Labor Day and then I start the next chapter." I set the frame face down on the treadmill. "Anyway. Sorry. You came here to unpack waffle irons in peace."

"I came here to unpack in peace and I got a whole documentary about your ex-husband," he said. "Honestly this is better than the podcast I usually listen to."

I laughed for real that time. He had a way of saying things flat, no smile, and somehow that made them funnier. I went back to my boxes and he went back to his, and the afternoon got easier after that. We traded bits of nothing back and forth. He told me about his granddaughter, four years old, terrified of balloons. I told him about the fitness classes I teach, and how one of my clients is so competitive she once pulled a hamstring trying to beat a woman twice her age on the rowing machine.

"Did she win?" he asked.

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters."

"She pulled a hamstring, Hal."

"So no!"

We worked through most of the afternoon like that. My arms got tired and my hair stuck to my neck and at some point I realized I'd stopped being angry for a while and hadn't noticed. That was new.

Then I heard a very specific sound from his unit. A clunk, then a rattle, then silence.

"Oh no," he said.

"What?"

"I just closed the door. With my keys inside." He stood there staring at his rolled-down door like it had betrayed him. "I locked my keys in my own storage unit. Who does that? Who locks keys in a unit with no lock on the outside but your own keys?"

"Apparently you," I said.

"I'm an architect. I'm supposed to be good with spaces."

"Well, architect, do you have a spare anywhere?"

"In my car. Twenty minutes away. Where I am not." He touched the back of his neck. "There's a gap at the bottom of the door. If I had something long and skinny I might be able to fish the latch. Or..."

"Or what?"

"Or somebody picks the padlock, which I don't recommend and wouldn't ask."

I dug in my purse. "I have a bobby pin."

"That's not... that's not how locks work, Denise."

"You'd be amazed what I can do with a bobby pin. My ex changed the locks on our house while I was at spin class. I was back in before dinner." I held it out. "Come on. What have you got to lose? Your dignity? You already locked your keys in a concrete box."

He took the pin from me, and when he did his fingers brushed mine and I swear it went through my arm like a current. He felt it too, I saw it on his face, that little pause where neither of us moved.

"Well," he said.

"Well," I said.

He got the padlock open on the third try, which honestly annoyed me. "Huh," he said, holding up the bobby pin like a trophy. "You weren't kidding."

"I never kid about locks. Or Richard's locks. That was a dark weekend."

He went to retrieve his keys and came back holding a flask, looking almost shy about it, which is a funny look on a man his size. "Peace offering," he said. "For making you witness the dumbest thing I've done in a decade. It's just whiskey. Bad whiskey. The kind you buy at a gas station when you're packing a truck."

"Hal. I teach six spin classes a week. I have earned bad whiskey." We dragged a couple of flat boxes over by his door, flipped them upside down, and sat. The concrete was cold through my leggings and the fluorescent buzz overhead was doing its one note over and over, and somehow it was the best seat I'd had all month. He poured two caps full and handed me one. "To new chapters," I said. "To balloon-fearing grandchildren,"