The reason he’d never said it out loud was something only Gary would have carried by himself for fifty years, and I had to hear it from his sister in my own kitchen with the coffee going cold between us.
The sentence on the bottom of that tin is one line, cut deep in his block letters, and it took me two readings.
RUTHIE — I HAVE LOVED YOU SINCE THE PARKING LOT AT KROGER IN 1989 AND I HAVE NEVER ONCE GOT IT OUT OF MY MOUTH RIGHT. HERE IT IS IN METAL SO IT CAN’T COME OUT WRONG. PUT YOUR THINGS IN IT. — G.
So it can’t come out wrong.
Gary stuttered. Badly, as a boy — Marlene told me he could not get his own name out at roll call until he was eleven, that their mother took him to a woman in Dayton twice a month for three years, and that the boys at that school were exactly as bad about it as boys are.
He got past it. By the time I met him at twenty-six you would never have known, except for one thing, and I lived with that thing for thirty-four years and never once understood what I was looking at.
When something mattered — really mattered — he would start a sentence and stop and go quiet, and then he’d get up and go do something. Fix the step. Change the oil in my car. Bring the trash cans up.
I thought that was a man being emotionally lazy. I said so. I said it to him more than once, and I said it to my sister, and I said it to a marriage counselor in Xenia in 1998 who nodded at me sympathetically for an hour.
It was not laziness. It was a fifty-eight-year-old man who had learned at eight years old that the harder he wanted a sentence, the more likely it was to lock up in front of somebody, and who had decided a long time ago that he would rather show it than risk it.
Marlene said he told her once, in the nineties, that he was going to figure out a way to say it to me where it couldn’t get away from him. She thought he meant a card.
He meant a tool and a piece of tin and forty-some hours in a cold garage.
I put loose change in it. Nine months of quarters rattling around on my dresser every morning.
In April his heart stopped in his chair on a Thursday afternoon and he looked peaceful, which is the only part I can hold onto.
I have gone back through thirty-four years since November and re-read every quiet minute of it, and there is not one of them left that I read the way I used to. The squeaky step was a sentence. The faucet was a sentence. That man talked to me constantly and I kept waiting for words.
The tin is on my dresser and there’s nothing in it now but my rings at night. My grandson asked me last month what it said and I let him run his thumb over the letters and read it out loud himself.