Part 3 — The Eleventh Key
Eighty people watched me hold up the eleventh key, and Tommy was the first to look away.
“It opens a locker at the postal workers union hall on Grafton Street,” I said into the DJ microphone, in a voice I hardly knew. “I found the tag in his truck. It is in his own handwriting. It says, Peggy Fund.”
Kelsey took the microphone gently from my hand. “Mom, we can do this tomorrow.”
“No, baby. Tommy, you can come with me or I can go alone.”
My husband sat down in a chair with his head in his hands. His brother put a hand on his back.
We went in two cars, Kelsey and her new husband, my sister, and a bleary Tommy in the passenger seat of his brothers van. It was ten at night. The night man at the union hall knew Tommy, and he let us into the locker room without a question.
Locker 31. The key turned.
Inside lay a postal money bag, and in the bag was a bank passbook. The first entry was dated 1991, five dollars. Month after month, year after year, in a clumsy hand, every deposit. The last balance said thirty-one thousand, two hundred dollars.
The first page was a letter. “Peg, this is for the day you need to leave me. I know I am no good. I put it where even I cannot get it, because I am weak and I am sorry. Please use it.”
Thirty-three years of ironed shirts, and he had been quietly building the door out of his own marriage, one five-dollar bill at a time, and hiding the key from himself.
I read the letter standing up. I did not cry. Kelsey did.
Tommy said, from behind me, in a very small voice, “I cannot stop, Peg. I have wanted to for thirty years.”
It was the first honest sentence he had spoken in decades.
I did not leave that night. I sat with him in the van until the sky turned gray. In the morning I drove him myself to the treatment center in Westborough, where his brother had already called ahead.
The Massachusetts lawyer confirmed that a judge dividing a marriage can count wasted money, and that the passbook was mine to use as I chose. I put part of it toward the retainer, and part toward a rental in Shrewsbury, where I would live while I decided.
Kelsey and her husband flew to Maine for a short honeymoon, and I sent them with the six thousand four hundred dollars that I had saved for the venue, replaced from the passbook.
Tommy called me from the center on the ninth day. He asked if I would iron his shirt for the family session.
I said I would think about it. And then I ironed it.