Ended up over at the Legion the other night after all.
Place was packed with old timers.
Which sounds insulting until you realize I was born during the Summer of Love and still somehow felt like the youngest person in the building by at least fifteen years.
Half the guys in there looked like they personally supervised the invention of cigarettes.
Better atmosphere than the nightclub though.
At least nobody at the Legion is trying to communicate exclusively through bass vibrations and concussions.
Had a couple beers. Mostly sat there stewing over this whole storage key mess and feeling irritated with myself for wasting so much time chasing something that probably doesn’t even exist anymore.
At some point I realized I still had the key in my pocket.
Started fiddling with it on the bartop without really thinking about it.
Guess I’d been carrying it around for days.
One of the older guys came up beside me to grab a drink and stopped mid-order when he saw it laying there.
Just stared at it for a second.
“Haven’t seen one of those in a long damn time.”
Turns out he recognized the tag immediately.
North County Storage was apparently a real place after all.
According to him, a lot of Legion members rented units there years back because it was cheap and the owner gave veterans discounts.
He remembered my grandfather around the Legion too.
Didn’t serve with him or anything. Said he was younger than my grandfather by a pretty decent margin.
Mostly remembered him as quiet.
Said he always seemed like he had something on his mind even when he was just sitting there drinking coffee.
I kept my mouth shut about all the Pennington material.
Just told him I was trying to figure out whether the key might’ve belonged to my grandfather and if anything connected to it still existed.
That’s when things got weird again.
According to him, when the storage place shut down years ago, some of the abandoned units connected to Legion members got temporarily moved over to the Legion property instead of auctioned off immediately.
Apparently nobody wanted to throw veterans’ belongings into dumpsters if surviving family might still come looking someday.
So a bunch of it ended up boxed up and forgotten in one of the old maintenance buildings behind the Legion hall.
Which sounds completely ridiculous.
Except the guy said it the same way somebody would talk about extra folding chairs or old snow shovels.
Like it was nothing.
Just another pile of forgotten junk nobody wanted to deal with.
Sat there for a minute after he walked away just staring at the key in my hand.
Shook my head and muttered:
“Hell... here we go.”
Had two more beers and walked home wondering what fresh stupidity I’d just talked myself into.