For as long as I can remember, a small carved wooden box sat on the left corner of my mother’s dresser. It was walnut, dark with age, with a tiny brass clasp that was never once locked. It didn’t need to be. My mother had a better lock than any key: my promise.
I was maybe six when she sat me on the edge of her bed, took my small hands in hers, and said, ‘Nora, you must promise me something. You are never to open this box. Not while I’m here, and not when I’m gone.’ The way she said it, quiet and serious, made me promise without asking why.
And I kept it. Through my teenage years, when I was nosy about everything. Through my twenties, when I thought I knew better than her about the whole world. Through the years I dusted that dresser for her when her hands got too weak to do it herself.
My mother, Eleanor, lived to be ninety-one. She passed in her sleep in the same bedroom, with that box still sitting exactly where it always had. After the funeral, my brother and I came back to sort through the house, and everyone else drifted off to other rooms.
I found myself alone in front of that dresser. Fifty years of wondering pressed down on me all at once. My mother was gone now. The promise had been for her, and she wasn’t here to keep it for anymore. With my heart pounding like I was six years old again, I reached out and lifted the lid.
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