The Secret He Kept

In the spring of 2015, Mom began to pack some of Howard's things away. She had kept all of his clothes and shoes in the same place for around a year and a half.

"What if he needs them?"

She would mumble this sometimes when I asked her if she needed help, even though we both knew he wasn't going to need them. 

I remember the day she found a heavy grey metal box in the back of their closet. 

Mom yelled my name, she sounded like she was panicked. I ran to her as fast as I could. It had reminded me of the way she screamed my name the day she found Howard in the woods. 

When I found her she was sitting on the floor with a screw driver trying to open the box. It had a lock on it. She was trying different angles on it, sometimes hitting it hard on the hinges. 

"What are you doing?" I asked her. 

She stopped trying to pry it open and looked up at me with misty eyes. 

"Have you seen this before?" She asked me. 

I shook my head. 

She said that it had to have been Howard's and that she had found it, stashed away like a secret. 

She got up and proceeded to call my Uncle Ron. He had all types of tools in his garage that he could've used to open it. 

After their phone call, mom told me we were going over there so he could open it with his table saw. 

We drove the 30 minutes across town in silence. Mom occasionally sighed very deep. Her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. She was nervous. 

Once we got there mom and her brother talked discreetly about it. I watched silently as my uncle began to open the box. He began sawing the hinges, which had traces of rust and seemed to be weak. 

The sound of metal ripping open metal was deafening, but we had to know what was in there. We thought it might have been coins or some type of collection, because it had been so heavy. 

After the lid was removed on the box we all stepped toward it slowly. 

Inside was manuscripts, novels, plays, floppy disks and notes that he had written. My father was a writer. 

I couldn't believe it.

Mom stared at all of them in astonishment. She later told me that he spoke to her about the novels he had written, but when she asked to read them he would shyly say "I don't know."

I had always thought I was the writer of the family. Everyone else had been based in mathematics, nursing, business or something technical. Howard had even been an architect.

Reading his words at first was like opening up a part of him that I never saw. He had always been quiet and thoughtful. 

When you had to talk about something serious with him, he would always pause between his thoughts and you could see in his eyes he was searching for the exact way he wanted to say something. 

His writing is different. He writes in these long and descriptive patterns. It almost reminds me of Joyce's 'stream of consciousness' style, but it is more poetic.  

As I read and remember more, I am happy to have shared the same passion as him... even if his had been a secret. 

Written: 2.1.17