My knees near gave, because inside the base of that dented coffee pot, sealed in a plastic bag, was a thick bundle of letters, dozens of them, each one folded and numbered, and the top one was labeled in Nadines hand: open one whenever you miss me.
I sank down onto the kitchen chair with that bundle in my lap.
She had written me a letter for every hard day she imagined I might face without her. She had known, somehow, the way wives know things, that her heart was not strong, and rather than frighten me, she had quietly written her love down, letter after letter, and hidden them in the one place she was sure no burglar and no careless husband would ever think to look.
The cheap coffee pot was never a thoughtless gift, it was a treasure chest disguised as junk, filled with a years worth of her voice, waiting for the day I would finally be lonely enough to find it.
I opened the first one right there. She had written: If you are reading this, my love, then I am gone on ahead, and you are sad, and you are probably being hard on yourself about something silly. Stop it. I knew you loved me. The voice never fooled me. I always knew.
She knew. She knew about the voice, about the real practical hon, about all my grumbling, and she forgave it in advance, in ink, before I even earned the forgiveness.
Each letter was a little different. One for my birthday. One for our anniversary. One for the first snow, because I always hated shoveling and she wanted to make me smile. One for a day I felt low. One, she wrote on the envelope, for when you finally buy that trolling motor, you stubborn man.
I have rationed them out over this past year, one whenever the missing gets too heavy. There are still a few left. I am saving them, the way you save the last of something precious, because when the last letter is read, it will feel like losing her voice all over again.
But here is the gift inside the gift. Nadine did not leave me alone. She left me a whole year of her, folded and numbered and waiting, in a ten-dollar pot I nearly threw in the trash.
I keep the letters in that same percolator now, back where she hid them, on the kitchen counter where I can see it every morning. The cheapest-looking thing she ever gave me holds the richest words anyone ever wrote me. I was a fool for a year. She spent thirty-four years loving a fool, and she is loving me still, one letter at a time.