…because in my two fingers was a stack of envelopes, thin ones, tied with a piece of kitchen string, and every one had my name on it in Marjorie’s hand. Not “Harold.” Not “my husband.” My name, the way only she said it.
There were nine of them. And on the front of each, under my name, she’d written when I was allowed to open it.
“The first Christmas.” “The first anniversary alone.” “Our anniversary, every year — read the same one twice if you have to, I won’t mind.” “The day the house is too quiet.” “The day you’re mad at me for leaving.” And one, near the bottom of the stack, that just said: “The day you finally let the coat go.”
That’s the one I was holding. That’s the one that put me on the hallway floor. Because I understood, all at once, what my wife had done, and how long she’d been doing it, and how badly I’d misread every bit of it.
Marjorie knew she’d likely go first. Her heart, the doctors had said, years back. So somewhere in there — I’ll never know exactly when — she sat at our kitchen table while I was off at work and wrote me letters for a widowhood she saw coming and I refused to. Then she took her good sewing scissors and opened the lining of the coat she wore every single day, and sewed her letters in against the hem, and stitched it shut so neat I’d felt it a hundred times pulling that coat off the hook and never once known.
And then — this is the part — she spent the next two years nagging me to give the coat away.
I thought she was just being practical, the way she was about everything. “Give that old thing away, Harold, it’s taking up the hook.” I thought she didn’t care about the coat. The truth is the coat was the most careful thing she ever made. She wasn’t trying to get rid of it. She was trying to get rid of it through me. Because she knew her Harold. She knew I’d hang onto that coat like I hung onto her, that I’d keep it by the door holding the shape of her shoulders and never move an inch forward. And she knew that the day I could finally bag it up and carry it to the donation box — the day I could let her go — was the exact day I’d be ready to read what she’d left me. Not one day before.
The letters were timed to my healing. She built me a door I could only walk through once I was strong enough to reach the handle. Two years she waited on the far side of it, patient as anything, letting me get there on my own.
I opened “The day you finally let the coat go” right there on the floor. I won’t share all of it. But it started: “Well, you stubborn old man. You did it. Took you long enough. I’m so proud of you I could cry, and I’m probably crying wherever I am, so we match.”
And it ended: “Now here’s your instructions. Give the coat away, like I’ve been telling you for two years — it really is just taking up the hook, and some cold woman at that church needs it more than a doorway does. But keep the letters. Read the rest when their days come. I wrote you enough to get through a good many winters. I wasn’t about to let a little thing like dying stop me from having the last word.”
She got the last word. She got about nine of them, tied in string, waiting in the lining of a coat for a man too heartsore to let go until she’d made letting go the very thing that brought her back.
I gave the coat to the church, Marjorie. Just like you asked — forty years of asking and two years more. And I’ve got eight letters left, and a lot of winters to read them in, and for the first time since you left that back door for the last time, I’m not dreading a single one of them.