Inside the back casing, fitted against the battery in Dennis’s handwriting on a piece of paper so small I don’t know how he wrote it, was one line.
Bottom drawer, my side of the desk, under the furnace warranty. I put in for it already. — D.
The jeweler read it out loud to me because I couldn’t get my glasses on fast enough, and then that poor man had to hand a crying woman a paper bag with her watch in it.
I drove home and I opened that drawer, which I had not touched in two years because it was his drawer and I am a coward about certain things.
Under the furnace warranty was a manila folder.
The top page was a letter to his district manager at Bledsoe Freight, dated the fourth of March, notifying them that he intended to step down from operations manager to part-time dispatch effective the first of June, three days a week, and asking about the insurance. There was a reply stapled to it. It said they’d hate to lose him at that desk and they’d make it work.
He put in for it in March. He gave me the watch in April. He was diagnosed the third week of May.
Under the letter was a page out of a legal pad with fifty-two lines on it, numbered, in his blocky writing.
Thursday, June 5 — Pymatuning, the good chicken place. Thursday, June 12 — that garden tour you clipped out. Thursday, June 19 — nothing, sit on the porch, no phones. Thursday, June 26 — drive to Erie, get a room, come back whenever.
Fifty-two Thursdays. He’d planned out a year of them.
And on the last page, in the folder, was the travel agency printout for the long weekend I’d been hinting about for months. Fort Myers, five nights, first week of October, two tickets, deposit paid the twenty-eighth of March.
For the woman who says she never has enough time.
He handed me a six-dollar watch at a dinner table in front of our children and said the truest sentence he had, and I smiled and said thank you and meant neither of them, and my daughter thought it was sweet and I let her go on thinking she was the only one at that table who understood him.
He was going to tell me in June when the schedule change went through. He wanted the first Thursday to already be sitting there. He was that kind of man — he never announced anything until it was arranged, and I had complained about that habit for thirty-one years.
Six weeks later he was sitting on an exam table being told what pancreatic means, and none of it ever happened. Not one Thursday.
The tickets went unused. The agency refunded the deposit in January and I never even opened the envelope.
Here is what I do now. Thursdays I don’t work. I put that little watch on with the paper face and the plastic band and I go do the thing on his list for that week, and when the list ran out last June I started it over from the top.
My daughter comes some Thursdays. My son calls. And I have quit waiting for the nice version of anything, because a man told me plainly what he was giving me and I was too busy being disappointed to hear a word of it.