I sat in a dark hotel bathroom in Rochester so I would not wake Walter, and I watched on my camera as Jerry, my first husband, the man I divorced in 1998, opened a cardboard file box on my guest bed and then looked straight up at the lens and waved.
He knew I was watching. That wave was him telling me he was not hiding.
Our daughter had given him the key. She had a key because I asked her to water my plants while we were at Mayo. Jerry had called her, told her he was sick, really sick, and that he needed to give me something in person and did not know how else to reach me. She was caught between her mother and her dying father, and she made a young persons mistake out of love for both of us.
The Ankeny police came. Jerry did not resist, did not argue. He was a seventy-four-year-old man in a flannel shirt who had trespassed in a house he had no right to enter, and he knew it, and he told the officers so plainly.
The box he brought held two things. A stack of savings bonds he had quietly bought over the years, made out to our daughter, that he wanted her to have before he died. And the thermostat was set to sixty-four, because some things about a person never change, and I almost laughed through my tears.
He spent eleven years keeping our house cold and I spent twenty-six years keeping mine warm, and he still could not bring himself to knock on the door like a decent man.
I did not press to ruin him. He was dying, and his wrong was the wrong of a frightened, graceless man, not a cruel one. But I told him, through the officers and later on the phone, that you do not let yourself into a womans home and sit in her husbands chair. You call. You knock. You wait to be invited.
The bonds went to our daughter, properly, through a lawyer, not through a break-in. I told her, gently, that she must never give my key to anyone again, and she understood. Jerry passed that winter. Walter, bless him, said we should send flowers, so we did. And I turned my thermostat up to seventy-two, where it belongs, and I left it there.