What Wasn’t Mine

There’s a drawer in my nightstand I don’t open unless I’m looking for something else.

I keep meaning to empty it.

I don’t.

Inside: A motel pen that never writes. A single cufflink with a cracked black stone. A key to a storage unit I stopped paying for decades ago. Burgundy sweatpants I bought from a bank robber going home on parole. They only cost me a bag of Maxwell House, two soups, and a handshake.

His name is gone now—the guy who robbed banks. But his pants are still here.

None of it matters. None of it earns the space it keeps. But it keeps it anyway.

The cufflink bothers me the most. I’ve never owned a set. Never wore French cuffs.

I want to believe it’s my dad’s, but I don’t think it is. I think I found it years ago under the passenger seat of a car I bought used.

Should have tossed it then. Instead, it followed me through two apartments, a basement room with no windows, and one winter where the pipes froze, and the landlord shrugged.

Sometimes I take it out and hold it to the light. The stone catches nothing. The crack runs clean through the middle, a thin pale line.

I tell myself I keep it to remind me how cheap things break.

But that’s not true.

I keep it because I don’t know whose it was. And I’m bothered by why that still matters.

Twenty years ago, I took a job dismantling old hospital beds for a reseller in Dearborn. Steel frames. Plastic headboards. Motors that hummed even when unplugged.

In my second week, I found a scrap of paper wedged under a mattress support: four numbers, a date, and a word I couldn’t read. Looked like a name. A place. Or an instruction. Or nothing.

I put it in my back pocket, intending to toss it later.

It’s in the drawer now, next to the cufflink.

The note’s edges are soft. The handwriting small. Tight. The kind of writing you use when you don’t want anyone to know, but don’t want to forget either. The ink’s faded to gray. The fold line worn through in two places.

Then there’s Kevin.

Purple chalk figure outlined in green, on purple construction paper. Barely any contrast. Could barely see the little guy. Looked like a tiny Martian.

The thing kept turning up. We’d put it away. It would appear on the counter. The bookshelf. The coffee table.

I asked our youngest, Alexis, “Honey, is this yours?”

“That’s Kevin,” she said. Matter of fact.

That’s not an art project. That’s Kevin. I can’t get rid of Kevin.

So I covered it with Saran Wrap and taped it inside the kitchen cupboard.

People pulling plates out would see it, and before they could ask, I’d say, “That’s Kevin.”

Kevin stayed taped there for years—through grade school, middle school, high school. The girls’ friends giggled at this faded purple thing every time they reached for a dish or a bowl for popcorn.

Alexis, in college. Kevin, still there behind the cereal bowls.

Alexis lives in Michigan now. In that house. The cupboard’s been repainted. Different dishes inside.

Last week, Keylea and I were talking about why we keep what we keep. Kevin came up. Whatever happened to Kevin?

I described it to ChatGPT. The AI rendered something close. Purple figure. Green outline. Wrong but close enough.

I sent it to Alexis with a message: Whatever happened to Kevin?

She called me. Laughing so hard she could barely speak.

“Oh my God. Is that Kevin?”

“No. That’s what ChatGPT thinks Kevin looks like.”

“I use Chat every day,” she said. “It’s like my therapist. I just ramble on and on, then ask it, “Like, am I wrong?”

We talked for a few more minutes. She told me about work. About the cutest dog ever, and how she wishes she could adopt it.

She didn’t answer about Kevin.

When we hung up I stood in the kitchen, opened the cupboard where the dishes are. Different dishes now. Different house. The inside of the cupboards are white and clean.

Sometimes, before sleep, I reach for the drawer in my nightstand without opening it. Just a hand hovering over the handle. Not touching. Not withdrawing.

A small pause.

Then I turn out the light.

And let everything I’ve kept —keep to itself.