I lifted it out, and my hands started shaking, because it was a flat packet of butcher paper taped four ways around, gone brittle from a winter of freezing and thawing, and Buck had written LORETTA across it in carpenter’s pencil.
Inside was a yellow will-call slip from Kessler Lumber and Supply.
One greenhouse kit. Ten by twelve, cedar frame, twin-wall polycarbonate, the good one with the roof vents. Paid in full, the fourteenth of March, eleven hundred and forty dollars, customer to schedule delivery. Buck’s signature at the bottom in that cramped little hand of his.
Behind it, on graph paper, was a drawing. He’d laid it out on the flat spot behind the shed where the ground drains — measured, squared, with the door hung on the south end so the wind off the field wouldn’t catch it, and the water line run from the spigot on the back of the garage, and a bench drawn in along the long wall at thirty-four inches, which is my height, not his.
He had drawn benches at my height.
I have wanted a greenhouse since 1998. I mentioned it maybe twice a year, the way you mention a thing you’ve made peace with not having, and that man never said one word about it except to grunt.
His note was folded into the graph paper.
Retta — the pot’s empty because you get to pick what goes in it. Kit’s paid for and setting in the back at Kessler’s whenever you say the word, and I’ve got vacation coming the first week of April to put it up. I know you wanted a necklace. You can’t start seeds in a necklace. — Buck
I called Kessler’s that same afternoon and I could hardly get the words out. Denny Kessler put me on hold and came back and said it plain: yes ma’am, it’s here, bay four, it’s been here.
Eleven months. That kit sat on a pallet in a lumberyard for eleven months and nobody called me, because Buck had told them not to spoil it, and then Buck dropped in the yard three weeks after our anniversary and never told anybody anything again.
Denny wouldn’t take a delivery fee. He brought it out himself on a Saturday with two of his boys, and word got around the way it does in a town this size, and by ten that morning there were nine men in my backyard with drills — Buck’s brother, two men from the mill, the kid from the co-op who Buck taught to drive a skid steer.
It was up by four o’clock. They set the benches at thirty-four inches because it said so on the paper and none of them would hear otherwise.
I said you shouldn’t have — really, in the ugly way, to a man who had already paid eleven hundred dollars for me to have the one thing I ever asked for. He didn’t defend himself. He just let me set it out on the step, and he never mentioned it again, and I let a whole winter go by punishing a dead man for a six-dollar pot.
That pot is on the potting bench now, first one on the left, and every spring the tomatoes start in it. It is the most expensive gift I ever got and it cost him six dollars.