Monday I sat in Mr. Hales quiet office and he handed me the envelope Dennis had left, the one marked only if she chooses the blue casket, and I opened it, and the first line said, if you are reading this, you picked blue, which means after forty-four years you still knew me, and that is all I needed to be sure of.
I had picked blue without a soul telling me to. Dennis favorite color. It just felt like him.
The letter said he had left this test on purpose, not to trick me, but because he wanted to give me something and he only wanted to give it to the woman who still knew his heart, and now he was sure that was still me.
My husband turned the color of his own casket into a question only I could answer right, so that from the far side of death he could be certain the wife he was leaving still knew him well enough to deserve the surprise he had been building in secret.
The surprise was in the second page. For nine years, since the doctor first mentioned his heart, Dennis had been putting a little away every month into what he called, in the letter, the trip account. All the trips we never took because there was always a reason not to, the mail route, the money, the someday. He had made someday real without telling me, and left instructions, and the name of a travel agent in town who was expecting my call.
Read this before you pick the headstone, he had written, because I do not want you spending the trip money on marble for me. Order me the plain gray stone, Marjorie. Spend the rest on seeing the ocean and the mountains and your sister in Oregon you always miss. Send me a postcard care of the plain gray stone. I will know.
I ordered the plain gray stone. And this spring I am going to Oregon to see my sister, and then to the coast, with the money my husband hid from me for nine years out of nothing but love. I cut that mans hair in our kitchen for forty-four years. He cried at dog food commercials. And he spent his last healthy years making sure that when I was alone, I would not sit still in grief, I would go, and live, and every mile of it he would be along for the ride.