Saturday I locked the den door and turned my phone off like Carol asked, and pressed play on Lindas old VCR, and there she was on the screen, my wife, sitting in Lindas kitchen in 2019, healthy and bossy and alive, pointing at the camera and telling me to sit up straight.
She knew, was the first thing. She had gotten the diagnosis before she told me, and she had spent one private week not falling apart but driving to her sisters house to make me a tape, because Carol never in her life left a thing to chance or a word unsaid.
She talked for forty minutes. She told me where the important papers were. She told me which neighbor to trust and which one to watch. She told me to keep up her jam garden or give the jars away, my choice, but not to let the raspberries go to waste. She was the least secret person I ever met, and here she was managing me from beyond the grave, and I laughed until I could not see the screen.
My wife timed this tape to the last mortgage payment on purpose, because she did not want me to hear her final words while I was still buried under a house note, she wanted me to hear them the moment I was finally free and could actually listen.
And here was the secret, the only one she ever kept. For the last three years of her life she had been quietly sending extra to the mortgage company out of her own little accounts, the rummage sale money, the jam money, so that the house would be paid off years early, right about now, right about when she knew I would need to not worry about money on top of missing her.
Then she looked right into the camera and said the thing I will keep the rest of my life. Jim, she said, I did not marry a man who does well alone. When a year has gone by, and only after a year, you have my permission and my blessing to find someone. Do not you dare sit in that paid-off house being sad. I was too much woman to be your last happiness. Go be happy again. That is an order.
She confessed one more thing at the very end, that she ate the last Oreo in 1996, which I already knew, because she confessed it every year, and we both laughed, thirty years apart, in the same room. I turned the phone back on. I unlocked the door. And I started, slowly, to do what she ordered.