I had to sit down, because inside that napkin were Raymonds dog tags and a bundle of letters tied with string, and the letters were the ones he wrote me from overseas, in 1968, when I feared every single day that he would not come home.
I thought those letters were long lost. We moved houses twice over the years and somewhere along the way the box they lived in vanished, and I had grieved them almost as much as I grieved the man. His words from the war, the young husband writing to his young wife across the whole wide ocean, gone.
Except they were not gone. Raymond had them all along.
He must have found them himself, years back, in some cleaning-out or moving day, and rather than risk losing them a second time, my sentimental man had hidden them where he knew they would always be safe, in the belly of the jukebox that held the best of us.
He never told me. That was Raymond. He would rather keep a sweet secret than boast of a kindness. He tucked his tags in with the letters, the tags he wore in all those frightening months, and he trusted the machine to keep them, and I suppose he meant to show me someday and simply never did.
I read those letters again with Patsy Cline playing, a woman in her eighties reading the words a boy of twenty wrote her from a war. He wrote about coming home to dance with me. He wrote that thinking of Marges jukebox got him through the worst nights. He wrote that he would marry me all over again the second his boots hit home soil.
He did come home. He did dance with me. We did have our whole long life. And his letters, which I thought the years had stolen, were waiting for me all along, kept safe by the man who wrote them.
I have them in a proper archival box now, his tags on top, and I have read them to our grandchildren so they know what their grandfather was, a brave and tender boy who wrote his way home through a war. When I am gone the letters go to them. Raymond kept them safe for me. Now we will keep them safe for him.