Keeping It in the Family

"2383…2383…” the elderly man who ran the storage facility murmured quietly to himself as he led me up two flights of stairs and down three long corridors before we came to the right door. He unlocked it for me and left me to it with a small condolent smile.

  The steel door rolled up smoothly and, flicking the light on, I sighed wearily at the contents. The six-foot by six-foot room was packed to the gills with brown metal filing cabinets and white banker’s boxes stuffed with manila folders. 

  Against the back wall rested a large framed black-velvet painting of a quartet of cats playing jazz instruments. Not to my grandmother Eliza’s taste, I thought, but then again, it might have been my grandfather Gerald’s. He’d always been partial to felines. 

  It would be a gargantuan task to sift through everything, but I had to find Gam-Gam’s most up-to-date will (seeing as her last wishes had not been specified in the old copy we’d found in her safe) and I had all morning to look for it.

  I was really hoping that I’d run across her recipe for Chocolate Gateau, along the way. The women in my family had been begging her for it for the last sixty years, but she hadn’t relented. It was a secret she’d take to her grave, she’d always said. Well, she was gone now and the files she’d cached away in this rented storage unit might just contain her very last secret.

  Taking a deep breath and straightening my shoulders, I grabbed the nearest box and began rifling through its contents, quickly realizing that they were only tax returns from 1985-1995. The next four boxes were more of the same. 

  It wasn’t until I slid open the top drawer of the nearest filing cabinet that I found anything of note. A red leather-bound diary. The handwriting was unfamiliar, bearing a more exaggerated, loop-laden cursive than other samples I’d seen of hers, but it bore a highly-flourished “Elizabeth” on the front leaf, so I shrugged it off and read the first entry. 

  “Well, it’s the beginning of a new decade, so it’s only fitting that I get myself a fresh journal in which to relay all my activities and inner thoughts and feelings. And here they are: I am a mother of two, with one on the way,”—I double-checked the date again; January 3^rd, 1960. That tracked, seeing as how my mother had been born later that year—“married to a man who wouldn’t notice if my hair was on fire. But, such are the vagaries and felicities of marriage. My mother did warn me about Jed, so I’ve only myself to blame…”

  Jed? I wondered, supposing it could’ve been a nickname. It saddened me to think that Gam hadn’t been as happily married as she’d seemed, but times had been hard on women back then, and I couldn’t imagine how much strain having two toddlers and being pregnant with a third could put on even the happiest of marriages.

  I flipped forward a bit in time and skimmed the page marked February 14^th. 

  “Mother took the kids off my hands so that Jed and I could have some time alone, but of course he got called back into the office before we’d even finished our lamb chops. I honestly didn’t mind, though, since I’d had a tentative date with “K” down by Porter Lake anyway.”

  A date? Who was “K” and why did his name merit the mysterious one-letter status? 

  “The lake was still frozen over, and we had the keep the motor running or risk frostbite, but neither of us cared a wit, since we hadn’t laid eyes on each other since New Years Eve. In the milky light of a gibbous moon, and with Elvis crooning “I Need Your Love Tonight”, I told him I was pregnant. He was a bit shocked by it—not as much as I’d been, of course—and asked if I’d told Jed the truth behind who’d fathered this baby. I just scoffed and rolled my eyes. 

  “At this point I don’t even know if Jed would care. He’d accepted my announcement with only a bland, ‘That New Years bonus will come in handy. We might have to add on another bedroom’ and hadn’t been suspicious enough to even do the basic arithmetic that proved the baby’s conception a complete impossibility. 

  “What “K” and I have is enough, for now, (it has to be, because of Jed, and V) and I can’t say I’m sorry about the baby. I’m hoping for a girl.”

  The revelatory shock of what I’d just read hit me like a Sherman tank and I suddenly found myself on the floor, my legs collapsing accordion-like beneath me. 

  My mother was illegitimate. Therefore, I was illegitimate. My entire life—my mother’s life—was based on a sixty-year-old lie! 

  Who the devil was this “K” person? And what gave him the right to barge in and break up a perfectly happy (well, maybe not perfectly) home!? 

  Except, he obviously hadn’t broken up the home or Eliza would have gotten a divorce.

  I wracked my brain as to any men I knew whose name—given, or surname—started with K that were, or would have been, in their 80’s or 90’s now. I could think of several, but then I remembered that “V” apparently figured into the equation somehow. Did any of them have wives with V-names?

  I stayed on the floor, clutching the diary so hard my knuckles blanched, as the penny dropped, and my stomach along with it.

  Kenneth Brady and his wife, Veronica.     

  The room suddenly felt airless as I looked down at the diamond ring on my left hand. 

  Declan Brady. Grandson of Kenneth Brady. 

  My fiancé.

  Okay, but maybe that wasn’t so bad. I mean, what did that even make us? Half-cousins? Was there such a thing? 

  I needed to call him. To sort this thing out. 

  Say we had children eventually; did we share enough DNA that they would come out with gills or a third eye, or something? 

  And Porter Lake!? The cozy little spot that Gam used to gather the whole family at every summer to fish and swim and camp, and in the winter to ice skate? That was the place where she’d conducted her illicit affair!?  

  It made no sense! My grandmother, who wouldn’t let us cross our legs at the knee, who didn’t approve of red nail polish, and who wouldn’t allow us to play anything other than Paul Anka in the house had carried on an adulterous liaison for possibly years and never told a soul about it! Talk about your dirty little secrets! 

  Just as I was about to have a full-on panic attack, I heard a voice shouting, “Wait! Miss McCarthy! I got the numbers wrong!”

  “What?” I asked, bewildered, as I struggled to my feet.

  The kindly man who’d shown me to this Little Storage Unit of Horrors came bustling up to the open doorway waving a piece of paper. 

  “I’ve transposed the numbers, Miss McCarthy. I’m so sorry. Your grandmother’s unit is 2838, not 2383.”

  “You’ve…” I murmured, my brain stuttering as it tried to work out what he was saying. “So, this isn’t Elizabeth McCarthy’s unit?” 

  “No! This is Elizabeth McCain’s locker. Please forgive my confusion.”

  I never felt more relieved in my life. 

  “Please don’t apologize. It was an easy mistake to make,” I told him, waving it off magnanimously. “Just out of curiosity…is Mrs. McCain still…with us?”

  He scratched his balding head and replied, “As far as I know. She moved out of state awhile back, after she’d remarried. Nice man. He was with her the day she rented the unit.”

  “Do you remember what his name was, by any chance?” I asked with bated breath. 

  “Oh, sure. Hard to forget our former states’ Senator, Killian O’Callahan. Mrs. McCain evidently kept her first husband’s name even after the wedding. She took it pretty hard when Jedediah passed, and I think she did it partly out of respect to Vera, as well... Your grandmother’s locker is just around the corner. Would you care to see it now?”

  I couldn’t help laughing at my previous panic as I replaced the diary and closed the tall metal door behind me, nodding to the kindly old man.  

  Declan would bust a gut if he knew what I’d suspected his grandfather of. 

  And my own grandmother! How could I have thought even for a second that she’d be capable of such deceit? 

  I suddenly felt a hundred pounds lighter, safe in the knowledge that my life still exactly as it had been the moment I walked into this building. Not a perfect life, but mine.

  Inside the correct unit now, I spent the next hour flipping through old files, all the while thinking about Elizabeth McCain’s longtime romance with Senator Callahan. I had no clue as to what havoc their shared secret had cost them, or who—if anyone—knew the truth of what I’d read in her diary. But at least she had stayed with her husband until the end, and now she and her beloved “K” were able to live out their twilight years together. 

  Eventually, I came across the updated will and, that task accomplished, I spent another hour perusing an unmarked box half-hidden behind a wooden bookcase that was on its last leg. Literally. It was leaning drunkenly against the back wall, which is why I nearly missed the box. 

  Thankfully, I found no leather-bound diary filled with decades-old confessions, but I did however find the much-sought after recipe. I was puzzled by what I found.

  It was printed on a piece of time-worn, dogeared cardboard that had clearly been cut from the back of a cake mix box, and that bore the brand name in large letters in the corner. 

  My laughter turned from surprised to practically maniacal as I realized the cake recipe we’d all been so desperate to replicate had been the intellectual property of a big-time corporation this whole time. 

  I shrugged resignedly and pocketed the recipe. Will in hand, I rolled down the door and clicked the padlock into place. 

  Oh well, I thought. If that’s the dirtiest secret Gam had hidden away after all these years, than she’d done all right. And besides, who doesn’t like Sara Lee?