Maria fit the key into the lock and turned it. The apartment was a little stuffy from being so closed up. She felt a little uncomfortable with her mission, although she had promised Garner she would do it. So she went over to the dresser and opened the drawer where he said she would find his memorabilia. There were only a few items in the drawer and they would easily fit into the shoebox she had brought to put them in. There was a scarf in the drawer and a single white sock with an 'R' embroidered in it. There was a large round button with a picture of Garner and Rose on the boat that goes down the Potomac. There was a novelty photograph they had taken at some cheap resort. He was dressed up like a gunslinger and she was dressed up like a dance hall girl. The picture was tinted in brown to make it look like an old photograph. There was a folded piece of paper that looked like it was Xeroxed from a book of poems. The paper was worn as though it had been looked at many times. At the top was the name John Greenleaf Whittier. There were several poems on the page but the one that was highlighted read:
"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: It might have been!"
Maria felt tears running down both of her cheeks and wondered herself what might have been.
"Well, I don't really have to be sentimental," she thought to herself.
As she turned to go, a glint caught her eye. The next drawer down had something metallic in it that caught her eye. She opened it and stood there awestruck as she looked in the drawer containing thousands and thousands of pull-tabs from soda cans.
"Why in the world would anybody collect something like this," she thought to herself. "One of those two must have been a pack rat or something."
She looked at the items in the box and sympathy for Garner tugged at her heart. "Well, he did say to toss everything else," she reminded herself. "And God knows what the press would do if they knew those two collected thousands of pull tabs. It really is a little weird when you think about it."
So she took a plastic trash bag and dumped the pull-tabs into it. Then she put the bag outside for the trash. It wasn't that she didn't care. It was just that she didn't know. The significance of the pull-tabs went right by Maria Theresa Diaz just like the many secrets hidden beneath the tranquil surface of the murky gray green waters of the San Antonio River.