He just couldn’t bring himself to say it with his mouth, so he said it with a rotary tool at eleven o’clock at night in the garage, and it took my sister turning that tin over in November for me to find out.
The engraving covers the whole bottom. Block letters, the way he printed on a fuse box, cut deep enough that you can feel it with your thumb.
THERESA — I HAVE NEVER ONCE IN THIRTY-FOUR YEARS BEEN SORRY. NOT ONE DAY, NOT ONE HOUR. I KNOW I DON’T SAY IT. I AM SAYING IT HERE SO IT CAN’T WEAR OFF. PUT YOUR THINGS IN IT. — G.
I have been waiting since 1991 to hear that man say something like that out loud. He said I love you maybe four times in our marriage and every one of them was on a telephone, which I always thought was because a phone doesn’t make you look at anybody.
My sister found it because she turns everything over. I never did. It sat on my dresser for nine months with quarters in it.
What undid me was the workbench.
I went out to that garage that same night in November and pulled the drawers out, and in the bottom one, under a tray of drill bits, there were forty or fifty pieces of scrap. Aluminum flashing, a strip of copper pipe flattened out, the lid off a paint can, a piece off an old license plate.
He had practiced. Every one of those scraps has some of that sentence on it. Some of them just say THERESA over and over. On one strip he got most of the way through and the tool skipped and gouged the S, and he started again on the next piece.
There’s a receipt in that drawer from the hardware store in January, an engraving tool and two spare bits, thirty-eight dollars.
A month. He spent a month teaching his hands to write a sentence he could not get out of his mouth, out in a cold garage, and then he handed it to me across the kitchen table and said, for your things, and that was all, and I said thank you and put loose change in it and tried not to feel the way I felt.
In April his heart stopped in his chair on a Thursday afternoon. He looked peaceful. That is still the only part I can hold onto.
I know now why he said it that way. A card gets thrown out and a sentence out loud gets forgotten or argued about later. He wanted to put it somewhere it couldn’t wear off, because that is exactly how that man thought about everything — the squeaky step, the faucet, the door that rattled. Do it once, do it right, don’t do it again.
The tin is on my dresser and there’s nothing in it but my wedding band at night and my mother’s earrings.
The practice scraps are in a shoebox on the shelf in the closet, and when the grandkids ask what they are, I tell them it’s their grandfather learning how to say something, and I let them run their thumbs over the letters.