He had been writing to me the entire time, and my granddaughter found it in three pages, on a Tuesday afternoon, holding a book I had dusted around for fourteen months.
The margins are dated. That’s the part that undid me. Every note has a little date in the corner, and the first one is the eleventh of January and the last one is four days before he died, and they run straight through the book in order like a man walking a fence line.
They are not about the novel. He barely mentions the novel, except once on page 40 where he wrote that the fellow in it was a fool and that he’d have lost me in the first chapter.
They are about us. Small things. The morning I burned my hand on the percolator in 1994 and wouldn’t go to the doctor. What I looked like standing in the door of the Legion hall in 1991. A paragraph about our son that I have read so many times the page is going soft.
And this, on the last blank page, which is the only place he explains himself:
Theresa — I couldn’t say most of this out loud. I have tried for thirty-two years and it comes out about the weather. So I bought a book nobody wanted for fifty cents and I put it where you’d find it, and I figured you’d get to it eventually and then you’d know. There are more of these. Look at your own shelves. — H.
Look at your own shelves.
My granddaughter and I stood in that front room and started pulling books down, and it took us most of an hour, and there are eleven of them.
Eleven paperbacks with cracked spines, on shelves I walk past every single day, mixed in with everything else. Fifty cents, a dollar, one of them still had the church rummage sale sticker on it. Every margin full. The earliest is dated 2012.
Thirteen years my husband sat in that recliner in the evening with a used paperback and a pen, and I thought he was reading.
He didn’t hide them. That’s what I keep turning over. They were on my shelves the whole time in plain sight, and he handed me the newest one at our anniversary and smiled and said he thought I’d like it, and I said thank you and set it on the nightstand.
Eleven weeks later he had a stroke in his sleep beside me.
The man who made the quilt out of my mother’s dresses and planned Savannah for six months without telling me had spent the last thirteen years writing me the longest letter of his life, one margin at a time, and the only thing he ever asked of me was to open the book.
I read one a year now. That’s the rule I made. I started with the fifty-cent one, and I’m on the second, and when I finish it in November I’ll put it back on the shelf where he had it.
My granddaughter reads them with me on the porch when she visits. She’s twelve now. She has started leaving notes for me in the books she borrows, in pencil, small and careful, which is not a thing I taught her.