Wednesday morning Janet walked me into a little back office at the courthouse and I broke the county seal on the envelope Betty had filed in 2015, and my wifes careful cursive covered two pages, and the first line said, I could not say this while you could still walk these rooms, so I waited until you had to leave them.
She wrote about the house. Our house, the one her father built, the one we raised three children in for fifty-four years. And she confessed the thing she could never say out loud, that she had always been afraid of dying in it before me and leaving me alone in all those rooms, and even more afraid of me dying first and her rattling around in them like a dry seed.
So in 2015, when the doctor first said the word about her heart, she made a plan, quietly, the way she did everything. She wrote it all down and sealed it with Janet so that I would only read it once I had done the one thing she knew I would resist, which was to let the house go and not die inside it out of loyalty to her ghost.
My wife of fifty-four years, who never kept a secret or spent a dollar I did not know about, kept exactly one thing from me, a letter begging me to sell the house and go live near the children, because she knew I would only obey her once she was gone.
She had already spoken to our daughter in Harrisburg, back in 2015, and there was a little apartment near her, and Betty had even picked which of her mothers roses I should dig up and take with me, the yellow ones, they were her mothers favorite and they would remind me of the farmhouse where we married.
Do not be sad in a big empty house for me, Roy, she wrote. I was never in the house. I was in you. Take the yellow roses and go be near the grandbabies and let some young family fill these rooms with noise again. That is the last thing I will ever ask you, and I am asking it from a courthouse drawer because I am a coward about goodbyes.
I sold the house. I dug up the yellow roses. I live twenty minutes from my daughter now, and the grandbabies come Sundays, and the roses took to the new soil like they had been waiting. Fifty-four years I thought I knew that woman to the penny. Turns out she had been planning my whole widowhood in secret, out of nothing but love, so I would not have to plan it myself in the dark.