My Father Brought a Locksmith to Sell the Ranch I Bought
My mother’s silver watch slid down my wrist, the metal links cold against my skin. I stopped to pull the strap tighter, two notches past where she used to wear it. Her wrist had been thicker than mine, softened by thirty years of working the family garden. My father had given her the watch for their twenty-fifth anniversary, and now it was mine.
She had left it in her jewelry box on the nightstand, and no one had touched it since the funeral.
I unpacked three heavy white mugs, setting them on the shelf above the sink. The water in the pipes was still rusty, running brown for a few seconds before clearing into the drain. I filled a small copper kettle and set it on the burner, the blue flame clicking to life under the metal.
The wind was rising, whistling through the gap under the back door frame. I took a roll of weather stripping from the box and laid it on the counter, but the cold was already settling into the floorboards.
