Under the false floor was a small wooden cigar box and a letter taped to the lid.
The letter started, “If you’re the one opening this, then I guess the girls took everything they thought was valuable and left you the toolbox.” I laughed through tears because it sounded exactly like Raymond. Then I sat right there on the hallway floor and read every word.
He wrote that he knew his daughters loved him, but he also knew how differently they looked at things. He said they would go straight for the china, the jewelry, and anything that looked expensive. The toolbox was where he hid the things he couldn’t stand the thought of losing. Inside the cigar box were thirty-one years of little pieces of our life together. Movie ticket stubs from our first date. Notes we’d left each other in lunchboxes. A dried flower from our wedding. Photographs I’d thought were lost during a move years ago. At the bottom was a stack of letters he’d written during his illness when he knew he might not have much time left.
I spent hours reading them. Some were funny. Some were ordinary. One was just three pages of memories from family fishing trips. But one line stopped me cold: “You were never my last wife. You were the love of my life.” I had to put the letter down and just sit there for a while. After a year of feeling like an outsider in my own marriage’s story, those words felt like Raymond reaching across time and taking my hand.
A few months later, Sandra called and asked if there had been anything worth money in the toolbox. I told her no, not really. That answer seemed to satisfy her.
That evening I carried the cigar box onto the porch and watched the sun sink behind the trees. The letters sat in my lap, the same breeze moved through the yard that Raymond used to sit and listen to, and for the first time since losing him, I didn’t feel like someone he’d left behind. I felt like someone he’d remembered.