Part 3 — Behind the Shelf
The second note was folded so small it fit inside the first, and my hands shook as I flattened it on Mitch picnic table.
“Glenn, the box is behind the bottom shelf of the pantry. Pull the whole board out. It slides.”
“It is the cedar box you built me the winter we married. I kept our wedding napkin in it too.”
Forty people sat very still. Mitch wife had already left, and now his cousin Dolores stood up and walked toward the house.
Mitch said she could not go in there. I said that was my house, and Pauline had wanted her note read before anyone went looking.
My brother Alden went with me. Together we knelt on the pantry floor in the dust and pulled the bottom board.
It slid out as easily as a drawer. Behind it, wrapped in a flour sack, sat the cedar box with her initials burned in the lid.
Forty savings bonds lay inside, stacked in order of the year, each one printed with two names. Glenn and Pauline.
The wedding napkin was underneath, folded square, with a smear of lipstick from the day we cut the cake.
I carried the box back out to the yard like it was made of eggshell, and I set it on the table beside the dented lunch pail.
She had written on the last bond in blue ink, “Eat the apple, Glenn. Spend this on living.”
Mitch dropped into a lawn chair. He asked whether the bonds could be cashed in his name.
Alden told him quietly that the Treasury pays the living owner when two names are on a bond, and Mitch had no name on any of them.
That evening Mitch came to the garage where I sat on my stool. He put the wedding band, the car keys and the checkbook on the workbench, one at a time, and he did not say a word until the last one.
He said he had owed money since the layoff and had been too proud to say so. He said he had burned the pail because he could not stand to read the notes.
I told him the notes were not written to make him feel small. They were written because his mother loved to say things on paper that she was too shy to say out loud.
The next morning we took the bonds to the bank in Topeka together, and I signed each one. I put half of it in a college fund for his two girls, in their names, with Alden as trustee.
Mitch sanded the dent out of the lunch pail on Sunday and brought it back with a coat of green paint.
Every morning now I pack my own lunch in it: bologna on white, an apple, and a note I write myself that says, “Eat the apple, Glenn.”