Because Gene had filled it, front to back, and the first line said: “Wanda — the well pump.”
Not a love letter. An instruction manual.
Page one is the well pump: where the breaker is, what the noise means when it’s cycling wrong, and Lyle Petty’s phone number with “he’ll come out on a Sunday, don’t call anybody else” beside it.
Page four is the propane, including the fact that the tank is leased and not ours, which I did not know after twenty-six years in that house.
Page nine is the truck. Page eleven is the taxes, and which drawer, and the woman at the office in town who does them and what she charges.
Page fourteen is the insurance policies with the account numbers written out in his block letters, and a line under it that says “there is more than you think, do not let anybody tell you to take a lump sum.”
Page nineteen is how to get the mower deck off.
Page twenty-two is a list of every man who owes him a favor, eleven names, with what the favor was.
Thirty-one pages of a man teaching his wife how to live in the house without him, written in the winter of that year, at the kitchen table, while I was asleep down the hall.
He was fifty-seven years old and healthy as far as any of us knew. His daddy went at fifty-four and his uncle at sixty and Gene never said one word about that to me in his life, but he sat up nights writing out where the water shutoff was.
The last page is the only one that isn’t instructions:
“Wanda — I know a notebook looks like I didn’t try. Trying is the whole thing that’s in it. I’d rather you be mad at me for a night than lost for a year.”
I threw it in the junk drawer and did not speak to that man right the rest of the night.
Two weeks later he was gone in the deer stand on opening morning with the rifle I bought him still in the truck.
And I have spent this whole year lost, exactly the way he did not want, because the answer to every single thing I could not figure out was in a drawer nine feet from where I was standing.
The well pump went out in February. I called Lyle Petty on a Sunday and he came out and asked me how I knew to call him.
I keep it on the counter now. It’s ninety-nine cents and it’s the most useful thing anybody ever handed me.
The rifle went to our grandson in November, and he hunted with it opening morning, and he sat in that same stand and did not shoot at anything and told me later he wasn’t really out there for that.