Chapter 9: The Tin

"Why my mother's tin?" I asked.

"Because I buried her best friend's secrets in it with my own hands," Aino said. "And because I should have asked for it three years ago."

"Come back alone, with nobody following you. Not Eskil, not Leena."

"Not even Eskil?" I said.

"Especially not Eskil," Aino said.

She turned and went back up the steps with her cane tapping, and left me standing in the cold with a hundred questions.

Eskil studied me.

"I'll wait on the road," he said. "If she says no one, she means no one."

"You trust her?"

"She's the only person alive I trust completely," he said, and went to stand by his truck with his arms folded.

I walked to the point alone.

My mother's tin sat on the highest shelf, above the stovepipe he had mended, where it had sat for seven years.

It was an old shortbread tin with a faded tartan lid.

I took it down and carried it back along the shore under my coat.

Aino's cottage was the oldest house on the bluff, a squat log room with a bread oven and a kettle that never stopped.

She sat me down at her scrubbed table, shut the door, and drew the curtains.

"Open it," she said.

I took off the lid.

My mother's wedding ring was inside, and her glasses, and a dried bunch of yarrow tied with thread.

A child's tooth wrapped in paper.

And at the bottom, wrapped in a blue handkerchief, the two small metal things I had picked up three years ago.

I unwrapped them on the table.

They were curved caps, each about the length of my finger, made of some thin dark horn, with a band of bright metal wire wound round the inside rim.

I had found them in the slush at the edge of the ice the morning after the funeral run.

They were beautiful, in an odd way, and nobody had been around to ask me what they were.

I'd thought they were old fishing lures.

I told Aino so.

She didn't laugh.

She picked one up between two fingers and turned it toward the window.

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