The masonry man worked most of the morning, and when the concrete finally gave way, he lifted out a steel box sealed in tar, my husband’s name scratched across the lid. He set it on the laundry room floor and stepped back like it belonged only to me. It did.
Inside were letters. Forty-six of them, one for every year of our marriage, each folded in wax paper against the damp.
My Buck — who wouldn’t say “I love you” without turning red, who thought romance was fixing your car before you noticed it was broke — had been writing me letters our entire life and burying them in the foundation of our home. Twice a year he climbed down there, not to check the joists, but to add a new one and read the old ones over. Every letter was dated. Every letter said the things he never could out loud.
The one from 1983: “You cried today thinking I didn’t notice you cut your hair. Wanda, I notice everything about you. I just don’t have the words in my mouth, so I put them in the ground where they’ll keep.” The one from the year our daughter almost died of the fever, thanking God and thanking me for being braver than him. The one from his last autumn, the writing gone shaky, that just said he was sorry he had to go first, and that the letters were so I’d never have a single day thinking he hadn’t loved me with his whole rough heart.
On top was a final letter, marked “For Wanda, when the house finally gives me up.” He knew someday a repair would find them. He built his love where it would outlast him — right into the bones of the house that held us.
The man I thought couldn’t say a tender word had been saying them all along, in concrete and wax paper, forty-six years deep, waiting for the day I’d need to hear his voice the most.
I read one letter a night now, in order, the way he wrote them. It’s like being courted all over again by a gruff man who loved me far better than he ever let on. Buck couldn’t pay a stranger to do what he could do himself — and it turns out the thing he did best, all along, was love me. He just kept that part underground.