I did not sleep a wink that night. The envelope with the second key sat on my kitchen table, propped against the sugar bowl, and I stared at it the way I used to stare at a drawer that was short a hundred dollars. Harold wrote the note in his careful block letters, the ones he used for grocery lists and anniversary cards. Do not use the first one. Forty one years married, and the man was still giving me orders from the grave.
At eight sharp I called the dealer from Wichita, a gentle fellow named Mr. Teague, and asked him to meet me at First Plains Bank on Main. Gregg and Ashlynn showed up on their own, uninvited, in their good church clothes, looking like two people who had finally run out of excuses. I let them come. I told them to sit in the lobby and keep their mouths shut. For once in their lives, they did exactly as they were told.
I know that bank like the back of my hand. I worked the teller line there for thirty four years, and every employee in the building has heard me say the same thing about lockboxes. The key you carry in your pocket is never the one that matters. The one that matters is the one the bank keeps in a drawer, and the number etched on the side tells you which box it belongs to. Harold had listened closely to me over the years, even when I did not think he was listening.
The second key had a number on it. Eighty one. The first key, the one the dealer had found wired inside the seat box of that antique hay machine, was stamped with a different number, and that box was at another bank entirely, in Nickerson, rented by a man named Dwight Pruitt. I called the Nickerson branch from the office of the manager. They told me Mr. Pruitt had been trying for six months to get into a box that held a debt he said Harold owed. That first key would have opened a hornet nest.
A careful man does not hide the truth, only the road to it, and trusts the right person to follow the markings.
Box eighty one was small and flat and smelled of old paper. The bank manager, a girl I trained myself, slid it onto the table and stepped back. Inside was a stack of letters held together with a red rubber band, a photograph, and a single sheet in the handwriting of Harold. I put on my reading glasses with fingers that shook worse than they had at his funeral. The photograph was of a baby in a christening gown. On the back, in pencil, someone had written: Marianne, 1965.
The letter was the longest thing Harold ever wrote. He said he had known about the baby from the first month we dated. My mother had told him. I was nineteen years old and unmarried in a town of nine thousand people, and in 1965 a good girl in Hutchinson who had a child on her own was a girl whose life was over. They sent me to an aunt in Salina until it was done, and a family took her. I came home thin and silent and told myself it was a bad dream. Harold married me anyway. He never said a word about it, not once, for forty one years.
He had searched for her quietly for twenty years. In 1989 he found her, a young teacher in Salina with a husband and a baby of her own. He did not knock on her door. He sat in the parking lot of her school, and then he found a church, and then he found a friend of a friend. Every April for thirty years, he told me he was driving to Salina to buy petunias at a nursery. He did buy petunias. He brought them to a woman named Marianne Lund, and she had planted every one.
The last paragraph made me put my hand over my mouth. Harold wrote that Marianne knew everything. She had agreed that I should be the one to decide whether we ever met, because he did not think it was fair for a man to make that choice for a woman. He had hidden the first key in the seat of the old machine so that anyone nosing around for something valuable would chase the wrong box. He had asked a friend to put the second key in my mailbox on the right morning, so I would not find it until I was ready. He signed it, Your husband, who loved the girl you were.
When I walked out of the vault, Gregg stood up so fast his chair fell over. I told him and Ashlynn everything, right there in the lobby, with the teller line pretending not to listen. Ashlynn cried first. She said the estate sale had been her idea, that they had been behind on the mortgage for a year, and that she had been too ashamed to ask for help. Gregg could not look at me. I did what Harold would have done. I put a hand on each of their faces and told them I would sort it out, but we would do it as a family or not at all.
I wrote to Marianne that same afternoon. Three days later, a woman with my chin and the stubborn silence of Harold stepped out of a blue sedan in front of my house. We stood on the porch for a full minute, neither of us knowing what to do with our hands. Then she said, “I planted the petunias along my fence, Velda. Every year. I always hoped you would see them.” We sat in the chair of Harold, the two of us, and ate sugar cookies, and talked until the streetlights came on.
That summer the whole family went to Salina to see the fence. It was pink and purple and red for forty feet, the biggest row of petunias I have ever seen. Gregg and Ashlynn held on to each other. The grandchildren of Marianne climbed all over my lap. I am seventy nine years old, and I keep the second key on a ribbon around my neck. I wear it the way some women wear a locket, and when anyone asks, I tell them it opens the best thing my husband ever left me.