By the time I reached the third location, a small branch library on the west side of town, I had stopped constructing explanations on the drive over. I walked in and went directly to the front desk and told the librarian my name and said I believed my grandfather had left something for me there. The librarian, an older man with a name tag that said Harold, looked utterly unsurprised. He said his buddy had told him the only person who would walk in asking exactly that question would be the right person. He stood up and asked me to follow him.
In the back office he unlocked a drawer and produced a thin file. I opened it. Inside were photocopies of bank records, pages of them, showing deposits made over many years into several different accounts. The deposits were not large individually but they were consistent, made at regular intervals, and there were more of them than I would have predicted. Different institutions, different account structures, but clearly documented in Grandpa’s orderly fashion.
What is this, I asked Harold.
He adjusted his glasses and looked at me over them. Savings, he said.
For whom, I asked.
He held my gaze long enough for me to understand he was not going to answer the question. The answer was in the papers.
I drove to the fourth location with the file on the passenger seat and the key in my coat pocket and a thought forming that I was not yet willing to complete because completing it would require me to revise something I had believed for most of my life, which was that whatever Grandpa had, he had divided among the five of us with reasonable equivalence, and that the differences in our circumstances as adults reflected only our different choices rather than any structural difference in what we had been given.
