I bought a storage unit at auction. My wife rented it. She does not know I have the key. I have not told her. Last Thursday I drove back out there with a thermos of coffee and a box of trash bags and sat in my truck for an hour before I could make myself lift that door a second time.

Ninety dollars. That is what the whole thing cost me.

I buy units and resell what is in them at the flea market. That is my Saturday and has been since I retired. The auctioneer never reads you a name. He reads a number, the manager cuts the lock, the door goes up for one minute, and you bid on what you can see from the walkway.

What I could see was a crockpot.

Not a crockpot. Our crockpot. The one with the crack across the lid handle from the year I dropped it on the driveway. Sharon told me she put that in the church rummage sale.

I bid against a kid from Tulsa and I won, and my hands stayed steady the whole time, which surprised me later.

Behind the crockpot was my mother’s quilt. The double wedding ring one. Sharon cried into that quilt at my mother’s funeral and then folded it up and said she could not stand to look at it.

Behind the quilt was a bed frame I had never seen in my life. Assembled. Made up with sheets.

And leaned against the back wall was a boy’s bicycle. Blue. About the size a ten-year-old rides. Somebody had painted the name TOBY along the crossbar in red nail polish.

We have two grown daughters. Neither of them has a son. Neither of us knows a Toby.

I did not call my wife. I drove to the hardware store, bought a padlock, put my own lock on that door, and then I went home and ate the pot roast she had waiting and told her the auction had been slow.

She said, “You spend that money on junk and I am the one who has to look at it.”

I said she was right, and I washed the dishes.

I have been married thirty-eight years. I was not going to trade thirty-eight years for one shouting match in a kitchen before I knew what I was standing on.

So I went back the next morning with a flashlight and I read the whole unit like a book.

Taped inside the door was a rent receipt book, the kind with yellow carbon copies. Cash, every month, paid at the office window. Six years of it. The name on every receipt was Sharon’s maiden name.

Under the receipt book was one more carbon copy, a different color, and that one was an access authorization form.

Tenant on the top line, in her handwriting. Second authorized person on the line below, in her handwriting too. My brother Gary. His driver’s license number copied out neat, the way she writes when she is being careful.

I put that carbon in my shirt pocket and I have carried it every day since.

Then I did the only smart thing I have done in all of this. I went to the office and rented 214 myself, in my own name, and I asked Dale at the desk a very reasonable question. I told him I did not want strangers with old codes walking into a unit I was paying for, and could he print me everything that had opened that door.