My knees near gave, because inside the base of that ten-dollar coffee pot, wrapped tight in wax paper and rubber bands, was a thick roll of cash, and folded around it a note in Nadines hand that read: for your trolling motor, you old grump. Surprise.
I had to sit down on the pantry floor.
She had been saving for it in secret. All spring, while I went on and on about that trolling motor for the boat, Nadine had been quietly setting aside a few dollars here and there out of the grocery money, hiding it in the one place she knew I would never look, the back of a dented old percolator she bought for ten dollars precisely so I would shove it away and never suspect a thing.
The cheap coffee pot was never the gift, it was the wrapping, and the joke, and the hiding place all at once, and she had meant to let me stew over it a while and then reveal the money and laugh at me, and I never gave her the chance.
Because I had said real practical, hon, in that voice, and shoved her secret to the back of the pantry, and a month later she was gone in the night, and the surprise sat in the dark for a year with her love and her laughter sealed inside it.
The note went on. She had written: I know you think this pot is junk. That is the point, you big dummy. Nobody robs a house for an ugly coffee pot. Now go buy your motor and catch me a fish and quit grumbling. Love always, your Nadine.
I sat on that floor and I cried like I have not cried since the morning I found her still beside me. A whole year I had hated myself for that voice, that ungrateful voice, and all along she had been playing the longest, sweetest trick on me, and forgiving me for the voice before I ever even used it.
I bought the trolling motor. Of course I did. I had the man at the shop mount it on the boat, and I named the boat the Nadine, and the first still morning I took her out on the water, I brought that dented percolator along and set it on the seat beside me.
I catch fish for her now. I talk to her out there on the quiet water. And every single morning, back home, I make my coffee in that ten-dollar pot, the cheapest-looking thing my wife ever gave me, and the richest, and I would not trade it for anything on this earth.
Thirty-four years she knew me better than I knew myself. She knew I would grumble. She knew I would come around. She just did not know she would not be there to see it. But I think, somehow, she sees it anyway. I make sure to say thank you, out loud, every morning, in a much better voice than the one she last heard.