He found her digging through one of the five steel filing cabinets that lined a wall in the garage. Some people had work benches for tools and shelves for gardening equipment. Some people parked their cars in their garages. Roby and Jeannie and kept their papers in theirs'. Jeannie claimed to know just where to find old recipes, tax returns and papers from her freshman year at college. If Roby needed old poems for a contest he wanted to enter, she sent him out to his cabinets - the three closest to the door. Sometimes, Roby would spend hours out there, browsing through his body of work.
She was thinking about her own history with the written word when he found her pulling folders out from the two cabinets that she claimed.
"Looking for a recipe?" he asked.
"No," she said. "I thought of something earlier. Something from a long time ago."
"What is it?" he asked.
She shook her head. She didn't want help. She would find it. She had to find it.
"Will you check on the soup?" she asked him. He shook his head.
"I want to help you out here," he said.
She stopped what she was doing and they stared at each other. He knew what she was looking for. He knew she'd read his latest contest submission. She knew that he knew.
For all the ways she supported him through the years - the baking, the encouraging, the financial support - she never once thought he'd take more from her. She never once thought he'd feel entitled to her words.
He stole her poems and passed them off as his own. He'd already sent the manuscript. She knew because she dropped it off at the post office.
"What do you have to say to me?" she asked.
He leaned against one of his filing cabinets and rubbed his beard with his ink-stained hand for a minute. Then he crossed his arms and shrugged.
"Nothing," he said. "Which is what you were doing with that stack of old stuff."
"You're right," she said, and started to nod her head slowly. "You're right. I was doing nothing. Which is what I've been doing all these years with you, too."
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