The Drawer That Wouldn't Open

The door of tito's studio sticks the way it always stuck, and for a second I think he is going to come from the patio and lift it at the hinge the way he always lifted it — *despacito, chiquita, hay que conocer las puertas viejas* — and then I remember, the way I have been remembering every six minutes for eight days, that he is not going to come from the patio. He is not going to come from anywhere. I push the door with my shoulder and it gives.

The copal from the funeral mass is still in my hair. I can smell it on the collar of my blouse — the black one with the small mother-of-pearl buttons that I have not taken off since the rosario, two nights and a day and another night ago. The pasta-tile floor is warm under my feet. Ochre, indigo, ochre, indigo, the pattern repeating itself toward the patio the way it has repeated itself toward the patio since 1908. The mango in the corner drops a fruit onto the tin lavadero with a soft, indecent thud, and I flinch as if it has spoken.

I stand in the doorway of the drafting room for a full minute before I can step inside. Every pencil is where he left it. The little bouquet of HBs in the chipped clay cup, the 2B in the groove of the drafting table, the folding knife closed on the corner of the blotter with two graphite smudges where his thumbnail rests when he is thinking. *Was* thinking. The light slants through the shutters onto the steel flat-files, four of them, gray as old battleships, and the light is doing what it always does at this hour — looking for him, falling on the place where his shoulder should be.

Mira, I say to no one. Mira, tito.

I trail my hand along the drawer faces, counting them the way I counted them when I was small enough to count them by climbing. One, two, three. The bottom drawer. The heavy one. The one he always tapped twice with the folding knife and called *esta es para después de que yo me vaya.* This is the one for after I am gone.

I tried it when I was twelve. I tried it when I was sixteen. I tried it at twenty-two, the week of his diagnosis, with the hot small panic of a girl who suddenly understood the phrase *después de que yo me vaya.* Every time, the same thing. A finger under the cool steel pull, a small upward jerk, the dead resistance of a lock that has decided.

I try it now. Of course I try it now.

Nothing.

I search the obvious places. The pencil tray — I tip it out, four pencils and a kneaded eraser the color of an old bruise, no key. The underside of the drafting table — I get on my back on the pasta tiles and look up at the rough underside and run my hand along the rails, splinter, splinter, nothing. The tin Nestlé Quik can on the shelf where he kept his erasers — I empty it into my lap and the erasers smell like him, the way the inside of his hat smelled like him, and I have to put the can down and breathe for a minute. The loose tile by the patio door I discovered when I was nine and pried up with a butter knife thinking I would find treasure. Nothing under it then. Nothing under it now. A small dry centipede curled like a question mark.

I sit on the floor in front of the bottom drawer with my back against it, and I say, half to myself and half to him, *ay, tito, ¿de verdad me ibas a hacer esto?* Really. Were you really going to do this to me.

The studio answers the way it always answers. The slow tick of the drip in the corner of the flat roof, the one he never fixed because, he said, *la gotera te enseña dónde está el techo* — the leak teaches you where the roof is. A moped on Calle 64, the door of a tortillería rolling up two doors down with the rusty groan I have known my whole life. A grackle in the mango — that wet, electric, *xkau, xkau* — and I have not cried since the rosario, not really, not the way grief actually wants you to cry, and I cry now. Quiet. Dry. Embarrassed by myself in an empty room. I wipe my face on the cotton drafting apron hanging from the hook by the door — the same apron he wore every day for forty years, the apron that smells of pencil dust and copal and the clean sweat of a man who walked everywhere — and I hold the bottom hem of it against my eye for longer than I need to.

The bell on the studio door rattles.

I know that rattle the way I know my own breath. I am on my feet before I am thinking, smoothing the front of the blouse I should not still be wearing, and my mother is in the doorway with her pharmacist's bag still over her shoulder from the morning shift and a folded brochure in her hand and a man at her elbow.

The man is wearing a polo shirt that is one size too small. He is already looking at the patio walls the way buyers look — squinting, multiplying.

"Itzelita," my mother says, in the bright brittle voice she uses for hard things, "te presento al licenciado Méndez. Es amigo de un primo de tu tía Mari. Vino a echarle un ojito al estudio, nada más."

*Nada más.* Just a little look. The polite Yucateco lie that wraps around everything that is not little and not nothing.

"Ahorita no, mamá," I say. I am still sitting on the floor in my head, though my body is upright. "Por favor. Ahorita no."

My mother's face does the thing. The flicker. Worry then fury then worry, the weather of my entire life. She turns to the licenciado with a smile that is mostly teeth and sends him to wait in the patio. *Permítanos un momentito, licenciado, mire qué linda la mata de mango.*

She closes the door of the drafting room behind him. She does not sit down. She never sits down.

"Mija." Softer. "Tu abuelo te dejó un cuarto lleno de papel viejo y goteras. Yo te dejé una carrera." She lifts the brochure. *Inmobiliaria del Mayab.* I can read it upside down. *Dibujante técnico. Sueldo competitivo. IMSS. Aguinaldo. Vacaciones pagadas. Todo en regla.* Everything in order. Everything in a measured dose. "Por favor."

I do not say anything for a long time. I look at the drafting table. I look at the cup with the four pencils. The light is on the corner of the lavadero outside now, that flat midmorning Mérida light that makes everything look like a photograph of itself.

"Tito decía," I say, and then I stop, because I did not mean to start there, and my mother's face does another thing — small, this time, the way the surface of water does a thing when something passes under it. "Tito decía que una casa bien hecha enseña a vivir bien."

She looks at the mango tree, not at me.

"Tu abuelo decía muchas cosas, Itzel."

"He was right about most of them, mamá."

"Yes." She is still looking at the mango. "And he died in the back room of this house with a leak in the roof and forty years of unbuilt drawings, and I loved him, and I am tired of losing arguments to a man who is not in the room."

I do not have an answer for that. The drip in the corner picks that exact moment to drip, like a comedian with terrible timing, and we both almost laugh, and then we don't.

"Hasta fin de mes," she says finally. "You have until the end of the month. Then we talk to the licenciado seriously. ¿Entendido?"

*Entendido.* I nod. I do not trust my voice.

She puts the brochure on the drafting table, on top of a sheet of vellum that has nothing on it but a tiny pencil grid in the upper left corner where tito tested his lead. She weights the brochure down with the chipped clay cup of pencil stubs. *Inmobiliaria del Mayab. Dibujante técnico.* My future, in twelve-point Helvetica, anchored by a cup of his pencils.

"Te quiero, mija."

"Yo también, mamá."

The bell rattles. Her shoes on the pasta tile. The bell rattles again. The licenciado Méndez says something to her on the way out that I do not catch, and the door closes, and the studio is quiet the way it was quiet before, only now I am standing in the middle of it with the brochure on the drafting table and the bottom drawer still locked and tito still not coming from the patio.

I pick up the apron to hang it back on the hook.

That is when I feel it.

A small, hard thing slides inside the bottom hem against my palm. Round-ish. The size of a child's tooth. The size of a thing a man would not want anyone to find by accident.

I stand very still.

The apron has hung on that hook every day of my life. I have pressed my face against it as a small child, against the front of it while he was wearing it, against the empty hung-up cotton of it when he was not. I have folded it for the wash. I have ironed it twice in a fit of teenage piety. I have never, not once, felt anything in the hem.

I carry the apron to the drafting table the way you carry something that might wake up. I turn it inside out under the lamp.

The lining at the hem has been opened and resewn by hand. The stitches are small, even, unmistakable — the same blind stitches he used to repair the corners of his linen vellum tubes when the leather caps split. I would know that stitch in a photograph. I would know that stitch in the dark.

I pick up his draftsman's scalpel from the blotter. My hand is shaking. I press it flat against the table for a second to make it stop, and it does not stop, and I begin anyway, picking out the thread one stitch at a time, slowly, *lentecito,* because I do not want to be wrong about what this is.

The first stitch comes free. The second. The third. The hem opens like a mouth.

A small brass key falls onto the vellum.

It makes a sound I will remember for the rest of my life. Not loud. A tap. The sound of something that has been waiting a long time arriving exactly on time.

The key is warm. From the apron. From my hand. From something I do not want to name.

I carry it across the room the way you carry a sleeping child. Six steps. The pasta tile is warm under my bare foot — when did I take off my shoes? I did not notice taking off my shoes. The bottom drawer is in front of me, gray, heavy, the small steel keyhole that I have looked at every day of my life like a closed eye.

I fit the key.

It turns on the first try. A soft, oiled click, as if he greased the lock last week. As if he greased it knowing my hand would be the next hand on it.

I pull.

The drawer comes out three centimeters and stops. I pull harder, and I feel the weight of it — not the airy weight of a drawer that holds two folders, the way the other drawers feel when I have helped him slide them open as a child. The dense, considered weight of a drawer that holds something a man spent a lifetime not showing anyone.

A smell comes out of the crack. Old vellum. Graphite. And underneath those, a faint sweetness I do not recognize — something pink, something mineral, something I will learn the name of later but cannot name now.

I rest my hand on the pull.

I do not open it the rest of the way.

I hear my own breath. I hear the grackle in the mango. I hear, somewhere very far away in my own head, in the voice he used when I was small and he was teaching me to draw a straight line without a ruler — *mira, chiquita, despacito.*

Look, little one. Slowly.

My hand is on the pull. The drawer is open the width of two fingers. The light at the corner of the lavadero outside has moved one tile, and the brochure on the drafting table is still weighted down with the cup of his pencils, and somewhere in Valladolid an eighty-nine-year-old woman I have never heard of is drinking her morning coffee, and somewhere across town a man in a white linen suit is reading the obituaries with a fountain pen in his hand, and I do not know any of this yet.

I only know that the drawer is heavier than empty drawers should be.

I only know that he left it for me.

I only know that I am not — *not yet* — ready to look inside.