I drew the envelope out of the band of the cover with two fingers, in the middle of the hall of Post 706, with the cake half cut and the Ladies Auxiliary hovering with their plastic forks, and I read the writing on the front once more. FOR RUTHIE. WHEN IT IS TIME. I did not need to look at the year in the corner. I knew it as well as my own birthday. It was the year Ray put on that cover for the first time, at the age of eighteen, at the gate of the recruit training command in Orlando.
Kevin sat beside me with his hands between his knees. He told me in a low voice that he had used the spare key to my house the week before, and gone to the closet, and taken down the hatbox. He had meant only to wear the cover for the ceremony, as a way of bringing his father to the wedding in spite of himself. He had found the envelope tucked in the lining under the sweatband, and he had not been able to open it. “It said your name,” he whispered. “I thought it should be you.”
I opened the flap with a thumbnail. Inside were two sheets. The first was folded in thirds and yellow as tea, a letter in a graceful, old fashioned hand, signed Anna Delacroix. His mother. She had written it in 1966 and pinned it to the uniform of Ray when he left for boot camp. It said: My son, a sailor serves his country, but a man serves the woman he marries. When you find her, be loyal. And if you go first, Raymond, tell her to live. Ray had carried that page for fifty years.
The second sheet was fresh, folded once, written in the blocky print the Navy teaches you. It was dated seven weeks before he died, on the back of a hospital menu. I knew then that he had known. He had written it in the cardiac unit, with the aid of a pencil from the nurse, and had slipped it into the cover on the visit when I took it to him, and told me nothing. I read the first line out loud, and my voice failed. Then Harold, standing behind me, put his hand on my shoulder and took the page gently out of my hands.
The deepest love is the one that, at the last, wishes the beloved a long and happy life, even beyond its own reach.
He did not read it for me. He only held it open where I could see, and I read it in silence, line after line. Ruthie, quit dithering. If you are reading this, I am gone, and you have been alone longer than you ought. I want you to marry again. I want a man who can fix your disposal and make you laugh in the car. Do not let anybody tell you that I would be ashamed. I would be the proudest sailor on the ocean. Tell Kevin to hold your arm. He is a good boy. Tell him from his chief.
Beside me, Kevin put his head down on the white tablecloth, between the cake plates, and his shoulders shook. I put my hand on the back of his neck, as I had done when he was a boy of seven with a fever. Around us, the whole hall was silent. The DJ had turned off the speaker. A hundred and ten people, retired sailors and their wives, stood in a ring of folding chairs and waited with their heads down. An old man at the back took off his cap.
“Dad would not be ashamed,” Kevin said, when he could speak. “I was the one who was ashamed. I was ashamed that I could not take care of you, and I thought that if you married somebody else, it would prove that I could not.” He looked up at Harold. “Sir, I said terrible things about you, and I had no right. I am sorry.” Harold stood and put out his hand. Kevin took it, then did something I will carry with me for the rest of my life. He got up and put his arms around the man.
Then he turned to me and held out his arm, the left one, in the old formal way. “Mom, I did not walk you down the aisle,” he said. “May I walk you to the cake?” The whole room laughed through tears. I rose, took the arm of my son, and he led me across the hall while Harold followed with the cover in both hands. The DJ started the music, a slow waltz. We stopped in the middle of the floor. Harold cut in, and Kevin stepped back, and I danced.
At the end of the evening, the Ladies Auxiliary insisted that we cut a second slice for Ray, and set it on a paper plate at the head of the table, with a plastic fork beside it. Kevin placed the cover next to the plate, brim forward, and saluted it. His sister came in from Atlanta two days later, having heard the news, and she sat on my bed and cried. By Thanksgiving she had met Harold, and she told me that he had the same kind of hands as her father.
The grandchildren came for Christmas, all five, and Harold taught the youngest to repair a toaster at the kitchen table. Kevin watched from the doorway, smiling, with his coffee. The hatbox sits on the top shelf of my closet, where it has always been, but the cover is no longer inside it. It rests on a small stand in the hall beside the front door, with the letter of Anna folded beneath it, so that every person who walks in sees it and tips their hat.
On the anniversary, we go to the cemetery, Harold and I, with a thermos of coffee. I tell Ray the news of the year. I tell him that Kevin holds my arm, that the disposal works, and that I stopped dithering. Harold stands a few paces back with his hat in his hand, and he never intrudes. When I turn to leave, he always offers me his arm, and I always take it. I think that is what Ray meant, in the end, by the word loyal.