I stood at that kitchen window and unfolded it, and the first line stopped me completely — Don’t you dare feel bad about the snow globe. You picked the one place on that whole road that means something, and I don’t care one bit whether you did it on purpose.
I had to read it three times before it landed.
That truck stop off I-40 is the Flying J outside Groom, Texas. In August of 1994 our car threw a belt on that stretch and we sat in that lot from eleven at night until a wrecker came at six in the morning, and Carol was seven months along with our daughter, and we ate crackers and drank coffee out of a machine and she told me around three a.m. that she was not scared of anything as long as I quit apologizing.
Thirty-one years and I have never once thought about that lot on purpose. I stopped there in December because it was the exit I needed for diesel and I remembered I had nothing in the truck for Christmas, and I bought a plastic snow globe with a cactus in it for eleven dollars.
Her note is two pages. The rest of it is her being kind to me in a way I did not deserve and cannot pay back now.
She wrote that she’d known by the ninth of December that I’d forgotten, because she’d asked me twice what I wanted from my list and I’d said whatever, and that she decided then that she was going to be gracious about whatever showed up and not make a thing of it, and that she was not being a martyr about it, that after thirty-one years you get to choose which hills, and this one was flat ground.
And then she wrote the part I’ve had to sit with.
She said she taped the note under it in January because she’d been going through her mother’s things that month and had realized that everything her mother ever meant to say to her was said out loud to nobody and lost, and she did not want to do that to me. She said she’d tape one under something every year and see how long it took me to find them.
She slipped on the ice in February. I had four days in that hospital and I said everything I had, all of it, every hour they’d let me. I am grateful for those four days in a way I can’t explain to people who haven’t had them.
There was only ever going to be the one note. She’d just started.
The Merle Haggard record is on the shelf and I have not played it. That’s a thing I’ll get to.
The snow globe is still on the windowsill. She never shook it once and I have shaken it about four hundred times, and there’s a chip out of the base now where I knocked it off with the dish towel in March, and I glued it and it looks bad and I’m not replacing it.
I write things down now. On the backs of receipts, in the truck, and I tape them where our daughter will find them — under her mother’s jewelry box, inside the lid of the deep freeze, one behind the picture in the hall. She has found two of them and calls me crying about it and tells me to quit.
I’m not going to quit.