I cut the first stitch with Destiny scissors, right there beside the register. The green fishing line came away in one long thread. Inside the lining was a flat oilcloth packet, folded twice, and when I opened it I found a small brass key stamped with a number, a fishing log bound in black leather, and a letter on yellow lined paper. The letter started, Gail, if you are reading this, Tara found out and tried to throw out the coat, or I am gone and you finally cleaned the closet. Either way, do not tell Erik. I laughed and cried together, and Destiny handed me a tissue. The thread coiled in my palm like a tiny green snake, and I could not stop looking at it.
The key belonged to a safe deposit box at the Bell bank on Eighth Street. The fishing log was not about fish. Page after page, in Arvid neat lineman handwriting, were dates and numbers. His father farmed out near Williston, and when the oil boom came, the mineral rights under that section were leased. Arvid had never touched a dime of it for himself. For nineteen years the royalty checks went into an account in both our names, then a savings fund he opened for the grandchildren, then a second account only I could sign. I had sat beside that man for fifty years and had never noticed a single thing.
Arvid wrote that he had kept it quiet because he knew money changes a house. He wrote that the day he was gone, he wanted me to have it, and he wanted me to be able to say no to anybody who asked. At the bottom, in smaller letters, he wrote, Check the coat pocket, Gail. The coat has always been safer than the bank. I stood there in the Goodwill with my husband coat on my arm, and for a moment I could smell the woodsmoke.
A coat lining stitched with green fishing line gave one Fargo widow a bank key, a log book and a letter her husband saved for her alone.
Destiny rang up the coat for twenty four dollars and ninety nine cents and refused to take a tip. I drove home with the heater roaring and the packet buttoned inside my shirt. Erik and Tara were watching television in the basement. I walked past without a word, hung the coat in its old place and went to bed. I slept better than I had in two years. In the morning I called my lawyer in Moorhead and made an appointment for nine o clock, before Tara even woke up. The smell of the bank vault was cold metal and old paper, and it made me think of the hospital basement where I once hid to cry after a hard shift.
At the bank, a young manager led me into the vault, and the brass key slid into box number 214 as if it had been oiled yesterday. Inside were the mineral lease papers, every royalty statement, a deed to a lake lot near Detroit Lakes and a note that said, For the ice house, and the man who builds it again. The account balance made my lawyer take off his glasses. It was a good deal of money, honestly earned, quietly saved, and entirely mine. That cup of coffee went cold in front of her.
Tara came to the Goodwill on Monday morning to buy back the coat. Destiny told me later that she stood at the rack for ten minutes in her good boots. She had learned somewhere, probably from Erik after a few beers, that Arvid once said something was “in the coat.” She guessed it was money, and she was right. When she came home and saw the coat hanging in my closet, she walked into the kitchen and said, “Gail, we need to talk about the coat.” I poured her a cup of coffee and said, “Sit down, Tara.” Arvid would have laughed at the tablecloth, which was the good one with the cranberry trim.
I told her calmly, as I used to tell frightened mothers in labor and delivery. The coat was mine. The papers were mine. She and Erik had until the first of April to find a place of their own, and I would help with the first month deposit, because Erik was my son and a good boy under all that. Tara opened her mouth, closed it and looked at the table. For the first time since she moved in, she said nothing.
Erik stayed up with me that night after she went to bed. He apologized for the closet and for his silence at dinner, and he cried like he did at seven, when the dog left us. I did not forgive him all at once. But when I handed him Arvid boots, which my friend at Goodwill had set aside for me, he put them on and said, “They fit.” I said, “Of course they do. You are his son.” He moved out in April and visits every Sunday.
Tara left a note on the kitchen table on the last day of March, two lines in her neat realtor hand. It said she was sorry about the closet, and sorrier about the rest. I read it twice and put it in the drawer with the take out menus. Later Erik told me she had been drowning in debt from a house flip that went wrong, and had thought the royalty money was a way out. That did not excuse it. But I am a nurse, and I know that people do foolish things when they are frightened, and I let myself feel a little sorry for her. A little snow drifted across the lake like a thin white curtain.
In March I had the ice house hauled out onto Lake Bemidji and Erik drilled the hole. I sat on a bucket in Arvid coat with my line down in the green dark, a thermos of coffee beside my boot and a little radio playing the Twins. Somewhere under the ice a perch was thinking about my hook. The coat smelled like woodsmoke and Old Spice and the cold, and I whispered, “Thank you, Arvid.” The line twitched just once.
