Brent was standing on my front porch at seven the next morning, in the same blue jacket he wore to the funeral of Gene, holding a brown paper lunch sack with the top rolled down. He had not shaved. He looked as if he had not slept since the police came. When I opened the door, he did not say good morning. He said, “Bev, I have to tell you the whole thing, and I need you to promise to let me finish before you hit me.” I told him I had never hit anyone in my life. He laughed once, a short shaky laugh, and I let him in.
We sat at the kitchen table where Gene and I had eaten breakfast for forty one years. Brent put the paper sack on the table between us. He did not open it. He told me that two years ago, three weeks before Gene died, my husband had called him out to the garden one evening and told him to bring a shovel. Together, in the dusk, they had buried an old army ammunition can under the third row of tomatoes. Gene had made him swear on the Bible, in the dirt, that he would say nothing until the second spring after the funeral.
I took this in slowly. I was sixty six years old, and I had been a produce manager long enough to know how patient a seed can be. Still, I felt a little ashamed of the thoughts I had held about my son in law over the previous day. “Why two years?” I asked. Brent said Gene had told him that a grieving person cannot make good decisions in the first year, and barely in the second. He said Gene wanted me to be settled, and strong, before I opened it. Then he took a breath and added, “And he said you would be angry at him, and I should let you.”
“The police told you I knew,” said Brent. “That was true, but they made it sound like I was hiding it for myself. I swear to you, I was counting the days. The second anniversary is Friday. I had a speech written. I was going to bring you out there on Friday with a shovel and a thermos of coffee. But then Joaquin and his crew started clearing the garden for the new foundation and hit the can early, and the police got called, and I panicked.” He rubbed his face. “I should have told you months ago it was there. I was a coward about it.”
The things we bury for the people we love are rarely buried to hide. They are buried to wait.
I looked at the paper sack and finally asked what was inside. Brent unrolled the top and set out three things. The first was the letter, which the police had already let me read, but which he now held out as if for me to touch again. The second was a small brass key, the same key from the can. The third was a manila envelope with my name on it in the blue pen of Gene. Brent said the key opened a safe deposit box at the credit union on Washington Boulevard, and that Gene had paid for it ten years ahead.
We drove there together, in my car, with Brent at the wheel because my hands were not entirely steady. The woman at the credit union brought out a long steel box and left us alone in a little room with a lamp. Inside were savings bonds, a stack of them, bought one at a time since 1989. There was also a worn leather envelope, which held the Army pay records of the father of Gene, who had carried the can home from Korea in 1953. The total, when we added it up, was a little over sixty one thousand dollars.
At the very bottom lay a folded travel brochure, soft at the creases, for a twelve day train trip through the Swiss Alps. I knew that brochure. I had torn it from a magazine in a doctor waiting room in 1996 and pinned it over the sink. I said once, out loud, that I would give anything to see those mountains before I died. Gene had never said a word in reply. But he had saved a few dollars every month for twenty seven years, and he had buried the proof in the ground that he loved best.
The note inside the brochure was only one line, in his blocky handwriting. Bevvy, I wanted to bring you myself. Since I cannot, take someone who will carry your bags. Love, Gene. I read it, and then I read it again, and then I put my head down on the steel table and cried for a long time. Brent did not say a word. He only sat beside me and kept one hand on my back, the way Gene used to when the news at supper was bad.
When I had finished, I wiped my face on the napkin of Brent and asked him a question I had been saving. I asked why Gene had chosen him as the keeper of the secret, rather than Jen or Joaquin or me. Brent was quiet. Then he said, “I think he knew I needed the job.” He told me that when he married my daughter, he had felt like a visitor in our family. Gene never said a kind word to him, never a harsh one, either. The shovel in the dusk was the first time Gene had ever asked him for anything.
We called Jen from the parking lot. She cried, and then she scolded her husband, and then she cried again. By lunchtime she had found the train company and a cancellation in June. I decided on the way home that I would take Jen and Brent both, along with Joaquin, who had been so kind to me during those long days with the police. Joaquin protested for a full minute, then asked whether the train had a dining car. I told him it did. He said, “Then I am in.”
We left Salt Lake on the second of June. I sat by the window and watched the Alps rise out of the clouds, white and impossible, and I held the brochure on my lap the whole way up. In the evenings I pressed a tomato seed from the garden into the soil of every hotel flower box, just to see what would happen. The garden is still there, all of it, wider than before. Brent planted the third row himself, in the spring. The first tomato was ripe in July. He brought it to me on a plate, still warm from the sun.