I had to sit down, on his stool, because what I lifted out of that hollow in the seat was a small flat packet wrapped in oilcloth, and inside it was a photograph of a young woman I had never seen in my life, and a pressed flower gone paper thin, and a folded note in my grandfather young hand.
The girl in the photograph was beautiful, and she was not my grandmother. And the note, dated more than seventy years back, before he ever met the woman I knew as Grandma, told me who she was. Her name was Ruth. She was the first love of my grandfather life, the girl he was going to marry, and she had died young, of a fever, in the summer they were meant to wed. He was nineteen years old.
For fifty years, every working day of his life, my grandfather had sat above the memory of the girl he lost, and never once let any of us see him grieve.
He went on, the way people did. He met my grandmother, and he loved her, truly, and they built a family and a long good life together, and I never for one moment doubted that love was real. But some part of a man never fully lets go of the first person who broke his heart, and my grandfather had found a way to keep Ruth close without ever burdening the wife and the children he also loved. He built a hollow into the seat of his work stool, and he laid Ruth there, her picture and her pressed flower and his young mans note, and he sat above her for half a century, quietly, faithfully, carrying an old sorrow nobody knew he still held.
The note was short. It said he would never forget her, that he hoped she had found peace, and that he would carry her with him all his days. And he did. Under him, at his work, through fifty years of making furniture and raising a family, he kept his first love in the one place that was truly his, and he never spoke of it, because a good man does not lay his old grief on the people he loves.
I did not know whether to feel sad or honored, sitting there on his stool with Ruth in my hands. Both, I think. Sad for the boy of nineteen who lost the girl he loved. Honored to have been let, by accident, into the deepest private room of a man I thought I knew completely.
I keep the packet now, Ruth and her flower and the note, and I have not told the rest of the family, because I think my grandfather would have wanted it kept quiet, the way he kept it quiet all his life. He was the most steady, gentle man I ever knew. It turned out he had carried a whole hidden grief beneath him the entire time, and never let it make him hard. If anything, I think it made him kind.