22

Nine Years Old

“Can you find the secret compartments, honey?” Daniel indicates the simple desk he’s been working on.

“You’re silly,” she says. There’s nothing magical about the plain, boring old desk he’s been working on. Besides, she wants to play with the Rubik’s Snake her dad bought her from a garage sale up the street. Designed by Erno Rubik, inventor of Rubik’s Cube, the snake is currently shaped in a V made up of twenty-four multicolored plastic prisms that rotate four different ways. “Why would I look for anything hidden in there?”

Daniel gently takes the snake from her. He twists the four prisms on one end of the V, and voila! It’s now a snake with a club foot. Salem claps her hands and squeals.

Her dad’s face breaks into a grin, a great big crinkly smile that looks like home and hearth and everything right in the world. “You see?” he says. “It feels good to discover hidden things. That’s why you should search this desk.”

She twists the other leg of the V and creates a club. She is falling into the puzzle, leaving this moment, her focus on the snake. She spots how, thirty-four moves out, she could transform the snake into a uniform ball. Daniel ruffles her hair, pulling her attention back.

“How about you give your old man a moment of your time?”

She doesn’t want to. The puzzle is calling to her. But he takes his wallet out of his worn jeans pocket, reaches in and tugs out a credit card, and slides it under the rim between the top and back of the unsanded desk.

A secret drawer pops open. It’s on the leg of the desk, completely unexpected. Salem drops the snake and peers into the drawer. “A diamond!”

He laughs, a deep, rumbling belly laugh, as she holds the giant Richie Rich gem in the air. “I bought that at the garage sale too,” he says. “You can keep it.”

She can’t look away from the plastic jewel. “Will you show me where the other secret drawers are?”

“I’ll do better than that,” he says. “I’ll let you discover them yourself, and you can keep whatever you find inside.”

She’d located two more drawers within ten minutes by knocking along the wood until she detected a hollowness, and then sliding her fingernail in nearby cracks to release the spring. The first drawer held a plastic ruby, the second a Lucite emerald the size of an apricot.

Daniel’s pride is written so plainly on his face that Salem blushes.

“It wasn’t that hard, Dad.”

He pulls her into an embrace so powerful she can’t breathe. She doesn’t complain, though, or consider dropping the jewels she clutches in her hands.

“You’ve got a gift, honey,” he murmurs into her hair. “You make me proud.”