The Leather in the Boxes

I'm Amy, sixty-two years old, and I've been an electrician for thirty-eight years. I've wired houses, strip malls, a chicken processing plant once, and one very weird dentist office where they wanted outlets inside the x-ray room walls. None of that prepared me for the fight I had with a moving box last Saturday.

We were moving into a smaller apartment on the edge of town. Simone wanted less space after her knee surgery, and honestly the rent was better, so I went along with it. The place is a mid-century building with radiator heat and one outlet in the bathroom, which drives me insane, but you take what you can get when you're sixty-two and your knees sound like bubble wrap.

The living room was a canyon of boxes. Kitchen stuff, books, more books, Simone's library sale haul that she swore she'd sort through. I had a box of tools shoved up against the bookcase and I was trying to muscle it toward the corner when my boot caught the edge of a trunk I hadn't seen.

That's when I saw the trunk.

It was wedged between the bookcase and a floor lamp, half behind a tower of cookbooks that never made it to a shelf. Leather, old, dark brown, brass latches, a small padlock on the front. Not the kind of thing you buy at a big box store. Somebody took care of this thing. Somebody kept it.

Now here's what you need to know about me and Simone. We met four years ago at a craft fair, of all places. I was there buying a new wallet because my old one was held together with electrical tape, which is a perfectly good repair method, thank you, and she was running a booth selling handmade bookmarks. She was fifty then, I was fifty-eight, and we'd both been alone long enough that we'd stopped pretending we minded. Never married, either of us. First serious relationship for me, which at my age is either sad or hilarious depending on the day.

We moved in together two years back and I thought I knew her stuff. I did know her stuff. Or I thought I did. That trunk was news to me.

I crouched down and looked at it. No dust on the lid, which was odd, since everything else in that corner had a coat of it. The padlock was small and the keyhole was bright, like it had been used. I didn't touch it. I'm nosy like the next person but I don't go through a woman's things, even a woman I live with. I just sat there on my heels looking at it like it might look back.

"Tea's ready," Simone called from the kitchen. Then she came around the bookcase and stopped dead.

She's fifty-four, retired from office work, works part time at the library now shelving books and arguing with the other volunteers about how the romance section should be organized. She had a dish towel over her shoulder and her reading glasses pushed up in her hair, and when she saw what I was looking at, all the color went out of her face and then came right back in a rush.

"Oh," she said. "Well. You found it."

"I didn't find anything," I said. "It found me. Nearly took my feet out from under me."

She set the tea down on a box marked MISC and knelt beside the trunk. She didn't open it. She put one hand flat on the lid, the way you'd touch a dog to calm it.

"It's personal things," she said. "From a relationship. A long time ago."

That was it. I waited for more. She wrung out that dish towel in her hands like it owed her money. I've been around long enough to know when a door's closed, and that door was closed. I could've pushed. Lord knows I wanted to. But she looked at me and said, "Not yet, Amy. Please," and I'm not the kind of woman who pries when a person says please.

So we drank our tea and talked about whether the bookcase would fit on the wall by the window, and the trunk sat there between us like a third person at the table.

* * *

Here's the other thing going on in my life. Miguel, my foreman, put my name in for a promotion at the contracting firm. I've worked with Miguel for twelve years and he's a good kid, thirty-five, sharp, doesn't waste words. The promotion means running jobs instead of just working them, which means more money and more headaches, both of which I could use. One condition. There's a rewiring job at an old textile mill they're converting to apartments, complicated as hell, knob and tube buried under forty years of renovations, and I have to pass a final inspection on Friday. Pass it clean and the job's mine. Fail it and Miguel stuck his neck out for nothing.

So all week I was coming home wrecked, eating dinner at nine, going to bed, getting up at five. Simone was handling most of the unpacking, which I felt guilty about, but she insisted and honestly I was too tired to argue.

Thursday, the day before the inspection, the job let out early. The inspector rescheduled for the morning and the crew stood around an hour and then Miguel said go home, get some sleep, you look like you slept in your truck. I did not sleep in my truck but I did sleep in my clothes once this week, which I'm not proud of.

I came home around four in the afternoon, quiet as I could, thinking I'd surprise Simone with takeout from the Vietnamese place she likes. The apartment was quiet. Boxes everywhere still, half unpacked, we're slow people, no shame in it. I set the food on the counter and went to hang up my jacket in the bedroom.

The bedroom door was half open. The closet was jammed open too, and there was Simone, kneeling on the floor beside that trunk, and it was open.

She had a leather cuff in her hand. Wrist cuff, dark, stitched along the edges, a brass buckle, the kind of thing you'd see at a fancy shop and then see the price tag and put it back. She was holding it up in the light from the window, turning it over, looking at it like you look at something you made yourself. Her face was flushed pink from her neck to her ears. She didn't hear me come in, or she did and forgot, I don't know which.

I should have backed out. I know that now. But I stood there like a fool with my hand still on the door and I looked, because what I saw made no sense to me and my brain wanted it to make sense. The trunk was full. Straps, coiled up neat. More cuffs, a couple of belts with rings on them. A harness thing that I looked at for three full seconds before I understood what it was for, and then I understood a lot of things at once, all at the same time, like a breaker panel where somebody throws the main and every light in the house comes on.

The leather looked expensive. Not bought expensive. Made expensive. Hand-stitched, edges burnished, the kind of work you can't fake. Somebody with real skill made every piece in that trunk.

And then Simone saw me.

She didn't yelp or slam the lid, which I half expected. She just went still, the cuff in her hand, her knees on the floor, looking up at me with her face going redder by the second. The clock on the nightstand ticked. Somewhere down the hall a neighbor's television was going. I could smell the takeout from the kitchen, lemongrass and chili oil, and none of that mattered because the woman I love was kneeling on the floor holding a leather wrist cuff and I had no idea what to say.

"Amy," she said. Her voice came out small. "You're home early."

"The inspector moved me to tomorrow morning," I said. Which was a stupid thing to lead with, but you say what your mouth grabs first.

She looked down at the cuff. She didn't hide it. That's the part I keep coming back to. She could have shoved it in the trunk and snapped the lid shut and lied, and part of me would have let her, but she sat there holding it in her open palm like she'd finally decided it was time.

"I was going to tell you," she said. "I've been trying to tell you for two weeks."

"Since the boxes," I said. "Since you put that thing where it wouldn't be seen but also where it wouldn't be forgotten."

She nodded. "I didn't want to lose it in the move. And I didn't want you to find it like this. And now you found it like this, so."

She set the cuff down on the lid, careful, square with the edge. Then she looked up at me and her chin came up a little, like she was daring herself.

"Sit down," she said. "There's a lot I need to tell you, and I'd rather tell it sitting than kneeling."

I pulled the one kitchen chair that had made it into the bedroom, turned it around, and sat on it backwards with my arms on the backrest like a man at a town meeting. She stayed on the floor, cross-legged now, her hand resting on the open trunk lid.

"His name is Reg," she said, and stopped, and started again. "I knew him twelve years ago. I was forty-two."

"Reg," I said. The name sat there. She'd never mentioned him, not once in four years, and believe me, I'd have remembered a name like that.

"A man," she said, reading my face the way she does. "Yes. That surprises people, I think, knowing me now. It surprised me a little at the time too, if I'm honest. But it doesn't matter much what he was, because what he was, mostly, was a leatherworker. He made all of this. Every piece in that trunk, he made with his own hands, and he made it for me."

She told it in pieces, the way people tell things they've rehearsed in their head for years and still can't get smooth. She met Reg at forty-two, at a leather market two towns over, bought a belt from him, came back the next month for a bag, and by winter she was spending weekends in his workshop watching him cut and stitch and burnish. Six months, start to finish. He was forty-six. It ended when he moved away for a commission out west, and she let it end because she was too embarrassed to chase it, too embarrassed even to ask him to stay, and after he was gone she put the trunk in a closet and didn't open it for years.

"Twelve years," I said.

"Twelve years," she said. "It came with me to every apartment. It sat in closets and behind furniture and one year under a bed. And then I met you, and I thought, well, that's that, it stays shut forever, and that was fine, I'd made peace with it. And then we moved here and I couldn't put it in a closet without you seeing it, because there's no room left to hide anything, so I had to choose."

"And you chose to keep it," I said, and she flinched, and I held up a hand because that came out harder than I meant it. "I don't mean it that way. I mean you chose to keep it where I'd trip over it. That's all I meant."

"I was going to tell you Saturday," she said. "I had a whole speech. It was a good speech."

"I don't need a speech. I need you to tell me what all this is, and what you want me to do about it."

She took a breath and looked at the trunk