Thursday came. I put on my church dress on a weekday, drove down Jackson Street, and walked up those steps into an empty sanctuary, where Pastor Ray was waiting with a folder on his lap and a strange soft smile.
He had me sit. He said Herbert came to see him all through that last winter, not to talk about dying, but to plan something. Something for me. Something he was determined I would have once the worst of the grief had passed.
He made me promise to wait a full year, Pastor Ray said, because he did not want you to say no while you were still too sad to say yes.
Then he opened the folder.
All my life I had one dream I never chased. I was born to Irish grandparents who talked about the old country until I could see the green of it with my eyes closed, and I always said that someday I would go and stand where they stood. Then I married Herbert at eighteen, and we raised our children, and there was never the money or the time, and the dream became one of those things you fold up small and put away and stop mentioning even to yourself.
I had mentioned it to Herbert exactly once, decades ago, on our honeymoon, when we could afford nothing and dreamed of everything.
He never forgot.
In that folder was a trip. Fully arranged, fully paid. Ten days in Ireland, in the very county my grandparents came from. And Herbert, who knew I would be frightened to go alone, had arranged for two of my dearest friends from the widows circle to come with me, their way paid too, so I would not have to be brave by myself.
He had saved for it quietly for years, out of a pension that was never large, setting aside a little at a time for a wife he knew he would have to leave behind. He wanted me to have one great adventure to look forward to, so that the year after losing him would end not in an empty house, but on a green hillside on the other side of the world.
There was a letter too. He wrote that he had watched me give up that dream for him and for our children without a single complaint for forty-six years, and that he could not stand the thought of me spending my last good years never having gone.
I ironed a shirt for that man every workday for forty-six years. I never knew he was quietly saving, coin by coin, to hand me back the one dream I gave up to build a life with him.
I went to Ireland in the spring. I stood on my grandparents hillside with my two friends beside me and the wind off the sea in my face, and I cried, and I laughed, and I felt Herbert standing right there with me. He could not come. So he sent me anyway.