I reached in and lifted it out, and I couldn’t breathe, because it was four pages of notebook paper folded into a square, and across the front, in pencil, pressed so hard it had gone through in places, was my name.
Not a card. Not a note. A letter. In my husband’s handwriting.
Dwight did not write. In thirty-one years I got a signature on a tax return and a grocery list that said milk, bread, the other kind of cheese. He didn’t send cards. At my mother’s funeral he stood at the back with his hat in his hands and let me do the talking, and people thought he was cold, and I let them think it.
My husband couldn’t read past about a fourth grade level. He left school at fifteen when his daddy got hurt and he went to the lumber yard and he stayed at that lumber yard for forty-two years, and he could measure and cut anything you put in front of him and he could not fill out his own insurance forms. I did those. I have done every piece of paper in this house since 1994 and neither one of us ever said a word about why.
Folded inside those four pages was a card from the Trumbull County Literacy Council with a woman’s name on it — Bernadette, tutor — and a certificate for one hundred and twenty hours.
Tuesday nights. Two years of Tuesday nights. He told me it was the union meeting and then he told me it was a fellow’s basement poker game and I about took his head off about the poker.
He was in a church basement in Niles at a folding table with a woman half his age learning to spell.
The letter is four pages and it is nothing fancy. It’s the summer we met at the Kinsman fair. It’s a paragraph about our daughter that I can’t type out. There are words crossed out and spelled again underneath. He got resturant wrong twice and left it.
The last part is the part I want to say out loud.
Ruby I never could say things in front of you because I was afraid of how it would come out and you would find out what I am. So I learned this instead. The box is broke on purpose. I took the works out so the letter would fit and I figured you would open it up sometime and give me the devil about it and then I would have to tell you. That was the plan. I love you and I have every day since the fair. Dwight
That was the plan. He was going to let me find it and fuss at him and then confess, and instead he handed it to me and I set it on a shelf and made sure he saw I was hurt over a ring.
Three weeks later he was gone at the lumber yard and the box sat up there for eleven months with four pages of him inside it.
I called Bernadette. She remembered him right off. She said he never missed a Tuesday, not once, not in the snow, and that he told her at the start he had exactly one thing he needed to write and after that she could quit on him if she wanted.
She said he made her read it out loud back to him about nine times.
The music box is on the kitchen windowsill. It still doesn’t play. I had the letter framed, and the pages are behind glass with the crossed-out words showing, because he earned every one of them twice.