Four days before clips.com expired, Otis Fairweather agreed to let us look, but not touch.
He sat at our father's kitchen table with his thermos and his reading glasses and the Nameplate Registry forms. Otis was the executor. Dad's will said he couldn't sign anything until the three of us decided, together, what to do with the domain.
We had not decided anything, together or otherwise.
"Reading isn't deciding," Otis said. "That's a legal opinion. I'm not a lawyer. I'm a surveyor."
He uncapped a pen. "But I've walked a lot of property lines, and that one seems clear."
"So you'll sign for access?" I asked.
"For access." He signed. "Your father would call this a reasonable opening. He'd also say I'm leaving my queen exposed."
Desmond answered after twenty-two minutes of pan flute.
Teddy said the song had changed. Gunnar said it hadn't. They argued about it for most of the twenty-two minutes. It was the closest they'd come to talking since the casserole.
"Oh, hi, it's you," Desmond said, when he heard my name. "The clips.com family. I put a note on the account. I've been kind of thinking about you guys."
He walked us through it. Otis's signed letter, a copy of the death certificate, a reset link sent to my email. Then the account dashboard opened on Dad's old computer, and there it was.
Four mailboxes.
ingrid@clips.com
gunnar@clips.com
maren@clips.com
teddy@clips.com
Nobody said anything. I heard Teddy breathe in and not breathe out.
"Can you see what's in them?" Gunnar asked. His voice was steady. His hand wasn't.
"No, sir. Each mailbox has its own password. The owner set them."
Typing, like rain. "I can see counts, though. Um. Okay. Ingrid has one message."
"And the others?"
"The other three have... wow. One thousand four hundred and eighteen each."
"Each?" I said.
"Each. All received. All from the same sender." He read out Dad's ordinary email, the one he used for hardware catalogs.
"They come in every week," Desmond said. "Sunday mornings. Going back to—" He stopped. "August 1999."
Teddy put her hand on the table, flat, the way you do on a boat.
"Is there a password hint?" I asked.
"There's a hint field, yeah. Same on all four." Desmond cleared his throat, as if apologizing for our father. "It says 'the usual.'"
We spent the rest of the evening guessing.
The usual. The sticky note on the monitor had said it. PASSWORD: THE USUAL.
We had assumed it meant something Dad did. Now there were four locks and one hint, and the hint wasn't helping.
Teddy wrote every guess on a label and stuck it to the fridge, under THEORY 4.
BLACKCOFFEE. No.
MEATLOAF. No.
TWINSLOSE. No. Gunnar's guess. He said it was the most usual thing in Minnesota.
HARDWARE. No.
SNOWBLOWER. No. Otis's guess. He said it was what Dad asked him for most.
OTIS. Otis looked flattered and then disappointed.
"He used my name for the garage code," Otis said. "1-2-3-4. He said it was after me, because I'm predictable."
By ten o'clock the fridge looked like a ransom note. The mailboxes were locked. And clips.com was going to expire in four days, taking twenty-seven years of Sundays with it.
That's when Sloane Achterberg arrived in person.
She was thirty-eight and very put together. Camel coat, navy scarf, a leather folio under one arm. She looked like she'd come from four airports and enjoyed all of them.
"I was in Minneapolis," she said at the door. Minneapolis was two and a half hours away. "I thought a face would be more respectful than an email."
She didn't push. That was the unsettling part. She sat at the table and accepted a cup of Otis's coffee and only made one small face.
She talked about Dad. She knew things. She knew he'd told her about Teddy's first radio award. She knew he'd once put her on hold to sell a man a furnace filter.
"Eleven minutes," she said. "I timed it. When he came back he said, 'Sorry. Man had a cold house.'"
Gunnar laughed, despite himself. Then she opened the folio.
"Three million one hundred thousand," she said. "Final. Corvane's board approved it this afternoon. The letter of intent expires when the name does."
She slid it across the table, toward Gunnar.
Toward Gunnar. Not toward the middle.
"You two spoke," Teddy said. It wasn't a question.
Gunnar didn't look up. "Yesterday. I took a walk. She called. I listened."
"You listened."
"I didn't sign anything. I can't sign anything. Otis can't sign anything."
He finally looked at her. "I just wanted to know the number before somebody decided for me. That's all I've wanted since I was eighteen."
Sloane, to her credit, picked up her coffee. She went to look at the living room photographs with great interest.
Teddy went out the back again. This time she took her coat.
Gunnar and I sat on the porch after Sloane left. The street was dark except for the hardware store's night light, which Dad had wired to stay on forever.
"I'm not the villain here," Gunnar said.
"Nobody said you were."
"Teddy's label maker said it. I saw the strip. It says GUNNAR — REALISTIC — DO NOT FREEZE."
I didn't laugh, but it was close. "She's scared. She thinks if we sell it, we sell the only part of Mom she was ever going to get."
"It's a label maker, Gunnar. She labeled the cat once. The cat didn't take it personally."
"The cat ran away."
"The cat was nineteen. He retired." I pulled my coat tighter. "Teddy was fourteen when he went. She labeled his bowl IN MEMORY and Dad kept it on the porch for three years."
Gunnar looked over at the porch corner. The bowl was still there, faded, upside down.
"And you?" he asked. "What do you think?"
"I think I'd like to know what's in the boxes before I put a number on them."
He nodded slowly. "That's the most Dad thing you've ever said."
He meant it as a compliment. It was the first time anyone had said that to me and meant it that way.
I found Teddy at midnight in the kitchen, sitting in the wobbly chair by the window. Nobody sat in that chair. It had a short leg Dad never fixed, which for a hardware man was practically a confession.
"Clips," she said. "That's the chair, right? Where she did it?"
"That's the chair."
She rocked it on its short leg. Tick. Tick.
"I keep trying," she said. "Everyone else gets a memory."
"Teddy."
"You get the spray bottle. Gunnar gets the sign on the fridge. I get a green coat."
I didn't argue. I went to the drawer by the sink, the one with the rubber bands and dead batteries.
In the back, under a manual for a toaster we hadn't owned in decades, was Mom's old pair of scissors. Dad had kept them. Of course he had.
I picked them up and opened them once. They made a small, clean sound. Snick.
Teddy went very still.
"Do that again," she said.
I did. Snick.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she looked seven.
"She used to ask," Teddy said slowly. "Every time. She'd snip the air right by my ear, to make me laugh."
Her voice cracked. "And she'd say, 'Just a trim, Teddy? The usual?'"
"And you'd say?"
"I'd say it back. 'Just a trim.' I said it like a grown-up. Everybody laughed."
We looked at each other. Then we both looked at the den.
Teddy was at Dad's computer before I'd put the scissors down. She opened the login for teddy@clips.com. She typed justatrim with two fingers, the way he used to.
The screen thought about it. Then the inbox opened.
One thousand four hundred and eighteen messages, every one with the same subject line. Sunday.
She scrolled to the bottom, to the oldest. August 22, 1999. She opened it and read the first line out loud.
"'Dear Teddy. Clips is closed today. So I'm going to try writing instead.'"
Up next: Appraisal
Continue to Part 5 →