The locksmith comes on a Tuesday afternoon. He is older than she expected, with hands like leather gloves. She offered to bring the drawer to him; he said, no, easier this way, the locks on those old secretaries can be tricky, sometimes the case has shifted.
He sets a leather roll on the floor, unrolls it, takes out three picks and a tension wrench. He glances at the drawer.
"It was my mother's," she says. "She died in January. I don't have the key."
He nods. He has heard this before, or a version of it. He puts the tension wrench in the keyhole.
She is going to watch. She had told herself she would not watch, she would go to the kitchen and make coffee for him, but now that the moment is here she finds she cannot leave the room. The pick clicks. The wrench turns a quarter. Then back. Then a quarter the other way. The man works with the absent precision of someone who is mostly listening with his fingers.
"Wait," she says.
He looks up.
"I'm sorry. Could you stop a moment."
He sits back on his heels, hands resting on his thighs. He waits. He has been doing this thirty years, she will learn later when she asks, and there is nothing he has not been asked to stop.
She does not know what she wants to say. She knows the inside of the drawer will be — whatever it is. A bundle of letters. Her own baby teeth. A revolver she didn't know her mother owned. Nothing, just dust and the smell of old wood. Whatever it is, after he opens it, she will have looked at it, and then she will have looked at it, and then there will be no closed drawer anymore.
"I think — " she says.
The man waits.
"I think I changed my mind. I'm sorry. I'll pay you for the visit."
He nods, rolls up the leather, takes the check she writes him. He says, "It happens." He says, "You have my number." He drives off.
She sits on the floor next to the secretary. The drawer is closed. The drawer is still closed. The drawer might as well be a stone.
And the stone is hers, and the stone is what she has of her mother now — not the contents, not the answer, but the shape of a thing her mother kept to herself, held closed, in a house that is now her own house with all the doors unlocked except this one.
She decides to leave it.