Because inside, where the coffee should’ve gone, Della had hidden a key on a bread tie and a folded receipt from a title company in Summersville.
Earnest money. Two thousand dollars down on eleven acres and a camp house on the Gauley, paid the eleventh of March, in both our names.
I have talked about that camp since 1996. Old Mose Tolliver’s place, one room and a woodstove and a porch that looks down at the water, and I have driven past that turnoff four hundred times in thirty years and said the same dumb sentence out loud every time.
Della never once acted like she was listening.
She’d been putting money back since 2019 out of what she made cleaning offices in the evenings, which is work I told her twice she did not need to be doing.
The Tollivers listed it in February. She had the down payment inside of a month.
The thermos was so I’d have something to hold while she watched me be disappointed. She’d told her sister the whole plan on the phone — her sister told me at the funeral, sitting on my back steps, and neither one of us could say much after that.
Six weeks later she didn’t wake up.
And that thermos sat on my garage shelf for a year because I wanted golf clubs and got a thermos, and I laughed it off in front of her, and I want that laugh back more than I want almost anything.
The receipt had her handwriting across the top of it:
“Closing is the 30th. Fill this up and drive me out there and don’t say one word the whole way.”
The thirtieth was nine days after she died.
The title company held it. The woman there, Bernice, would not let it lapse. She called our son twice and then she just quietly kept extending it on her own until somebody came in.
I closed on it in July, alone, and signed both lines because a widower has to.
The porch needed everything. I have been out there most weekends since with a circular saw and a bad shoulder, and it is straight now, and the woodstove draws.
The earrings are in her jewelry box upstairs. Our daughter will get them and she does not know yet.
I take the green thermos out there every Saturday. It’s cracked from where it hit the concrete and it does not hold heat worth a nickel, and I fill it anyway and I set it on the rail while I work.
She said don’t say one word the whole way. I keep that too. I drive out there in the quiet, thirty-one years of it, and I don’t say a thing until I’m standing on that porch.