Wrapped in the rag was a small velvet pouch, gone stiff with age, and a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon that had once been blue. I sat down on the stool because my knees told me to.
The pouch held two wedding rings. A man band and a woman band, both worn thin. And the letters were between Al and his Rosemary, from before I ever knew either of them, back when he was courting her and putting into words the kind of thing men of his make can only ever write down and never say.
Rosemary passed six years ago. I was at the funeral. And I remembered, standing over that open refrigerator, something Al had said one of those Saturdays, into his beer, not really to me. He had said he lost her rings somewhere in the year she died and it near killed him a second time, that he had torn the house apart and never found them and had to make his peace with being a careless old fool.
He had not been careless. He had hidden them himself, in the one place a grieving man might tuck a thing too precious to look at and too precious to lose, behind the compressor of a garage refrigerator, and then his grief had swallowed the memory of doing it. For six years he had mourned rings that were riding safe in his own garage the whole time.
I did not finish sweeping. I put that pouch and those letters in my coat and drove straight over to Al house, where the moving boxes were stacked by the door and his whole life was going into a truck bound for Florida.
I put the pouch in his hand and watched a twenty year friend of mine fall apart on his own front step, in the best way a man can.
You did not just sell me a refrigerator, Al. You sent her home with me by accident, and I am bringing her back to you.
That is the closest thing to the exact words I said. He could not talk for a while. Then he slid the Rosemary band onto his little finger where it would fit, and put his own back on, and the two of us sat down on his packing boxes and did not say much of anything, the way we never had to.
Al drove to Florida the next week with his wife rings back on his hand and her letters on the seat beside him. I kept the refrigerator. It still runs cold as anything, just like he promised. Every Saturday I sit on that stool beside it with a beer and I miss my friend, and I am glad, so glad, that the last thing I ever did for him was give him back the best of what he had.