I lifted that oilcloth bundle out of the false bottom and set my drill down on the garage floor, because it was heavier and more solid than anything a man hides for no reason.
I unwrapped it slow on the workbench. Inside was a wooden case, and in the case, laid in faded velvet, were medals. Military medals, real ones, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart among them, and folded beneath them a stack of letters tied with string, and a small triangle of a flag.
The old man whose house I had cleared had been a veteran. His kids, the ones who told me to just haul it all and gave me a flat price sight unseen, had never mentioned it. Maybe they never knew. Scattered and uninterested, the way I was told.
But the letters had a name on them, written over and over in the old mans hand. Not to a son or a daughter. To a granddaughter. Little notes he had written her across the years and, by the look of it, never managed to send.
He had hidden the things that mattered most to him in the one place his own children would never bother to look, and he had saved every one of them for the one grandchild who had loved him.
It took me a few weeks to find her. She was grown, living two states away, and when I told her what I had she went quiet on the phone, and then she wept.
She told me she had written to her grandfather all through her childhood and into her twenties, and that his letters back had been the steadiest thing in her life, and then they had stopped, and she had thought, in the last years, that he had forgotten her. He had not. He had kept writing. He just could not manage the mailbox anymore, and he had put the letters somewhere safe, meaning to give them to her himself, and run out of time.
I mailed her the whole bundle. The medals, the flag, every letter. I insured the box for more than the estate was worth to me and I did not think twice about it.
She sent me a photo a while later. She had framed his medals and hung them in her front hall, and the letters she keeps in a drawer by her bed, and she reads one whenever she misses him, which she said is often.
Twelve years hauling other peoples lives out of houses, and most of it is just things. But every so often you carry out something that was never junk at all. Something that was somebody, waiting to get home to the one who loved them.
