Because inside that box were forty-one envelopes standing on edge like files, and every one of them had my name on it and a line underneath telling me when to open it.
The first hard night. The first Christmas. When the house is too quiet. When you can’t sleep and it’s three in the morning. When somebody says something stupid at church and means well.
When you decide to sell this house.
When you’re mad at me for leaving.
When you’re ready to be happy again and feel guilty about it.
One on top, laid flat across the others, that just said OPEN FIRST.
I sat down on that closet floor with the tape in my hand and I could not get my breath for a while.
He knew. That’s what the first one says. In January a cardiologist in Terre Haute told my husband his heart was in worse shape than he’d let on to anybody, including me, and gave him numbers and choices, and Harold walked out of there and told me the appointment went fine.
I am still working out how I feel about that and I expect I will be for a while.
What he did with it was sit at the kitchen table on the nights I went to my sister’s, from February to April, and write forty-one letters to a woman who was going to be alone.
The first one is a page and a half. It ends like this:
“I couldn’t tell you and be looked at like that for however long I had. That’s cowardice and I know it. So I did the only brave thing I had in me, which was to sit here and get ahead of it. Don’t read them all tonight, Ruthie. Ration me.”
Three weeks after he handed me that box he was gone in his chair during the ballgame.
And it sat up on the closet shelf for eleven months because I was hurt about a ring.
I have opened nine of them. Not in order — in order of what came at me.
“When you can’t sleep” is mostly about a trip we took to Michigan in 1988 and it is very boring on purpose, and it works, and I have read it maybe twenty times.
I did not sell the house. I opened that one and then I called my daughter and told her I was staying, and she cried, and she said she’d been trying to figure out how to talk me out of it since August.
The shotgun’s in the cabinet. Our son-in-law asked about it once and I said not yet.
Thirty-two left. He said ration me.