Because what Marlene had recorded on it was fifty-one files, one for every week of that year, and she numbered them out loud at the start of each one like a woman reading off a grocery list.
File one is her at our kitchen table telling about the night we met at the Elks in 1993, including the part where she thought I was somebody else’s date and was rude to me on purpose.
File nine is her mother’s chicken and dumplings, spoken out, with all the asides.
File twenty-two is her singing. She would not sing in front of me in thirty-two years of marriage. Not at church, not in the car. And she sat in this house by herself on some Tuesday afternoon and sang two verses of an old hymn into a twelve-dollar recorder, and got tickled at herself at the end, and you can hear her laugh.
I have listened to those eleven seconds about four hundred times.
Her mother died in 1998, and Marlene said the same thing to me for twenty-seven years: that she could remember exactly what her mother looked like and could not, for anything, remember what she sounded like. It ate at her. There is no recording of that woman anywhere on this earth.
So she made one of herself. Fifty-one weeks of a woman sitting alone in a kitchen, on purpose, so that I would never have to go through what she went through.
And I got a gadget for my anniversary, and I let her see my face.
File fifty-one is nine seconds long. It’s the last one, recorded four days before she went, and it’s the only one where she talks to me instead of at the machine:
“Dale, honey — if you’re finally listening to these, I forgive you about the watch. Start at number one. Take your time.”
She knew. Not that she was going; nobody knew that. She knew I’d shoved it in a drawer, and she left me a joke about it in case I ever came back around to it.
A month later she had the stroke in her chair by the window.
That recorder sat in the drawer eleven months, and I picked it up to erase it.
Our grandson has copied the files twice now, to two different places, and he did not ask me one question about why my voice was doing what it was doing on the phone.
The diamond band is in her jewelry box. Our daughter gets it and doesn’t know yet.
I play one a week. I’m on twenty-nine. I’m rationing, and I know exactly what that means, and I’m doing it anyway.