I turned the key in the lock of unit 214 and rolled up the door, braced for the worst, and the light fell on a desk, a lamp, a comfortable chair, and stacks and stacks of paper, and a typewriter, and I stepped closer to see what my husband had been writing out here in secret for fourteen years.
The top page read: Our Life, by the luckiest man in Texas.
My husband, who narrated a trip to Ace Hardware but never once claimed to be a writer, had been secretly writing a book, the story of our marriage, our children, our whole life together, four hundred pages of it, so that it would never be lost.
I sat down in his chair and began to read, and there was our whole life on the page, in his plain honest voice. The day we met at the church social. How scared he was to ask me out. Our wedding. The night our first child was born. The lean years and the good ones. Every chapter a piece of us, remembered in loving detail by the man who lived it beside me.
He had written a chapter about my mothers passing, and how he held me. A chapter about our sons wedding. A chapter, I could barely read it, simply titled Why I Love Ruth, forty-four years of reasons.
There was a note clipped to the manuscript. It said: Ruthie, I am no writer, but somebody had to set our life down before it slipped away. I wanted the grandkids to be able to read it, to know us, to know that a plain man and a wonderful woman built something worth remembering. I did not quite finish. Finish it for me, love. You know the ending better than I do.
The almost always he came with. In the manuscript, in a chapter near the end, he wrote about our grandson coming out to help him type, the boy fixing his grandfathers hunt-and-peck mistakes, sworn to secrecy. That was the almost.
I wept over that manuscript for a week. Then I did what he asked. I finished it. I wrote the last chapter myself, about losing him, about finding this unit, about learning how deeply I was loved.
I had the book printed, copies for every child and grandchild. Our Life, by the luckiest man in Texas, finished by the luckiest woman. They treasure it. They read our whole story to their own children now.
The storage unit held no betrayal. It held our entire life, written down in love by a man determined we would not be forgotten. Sixty-seven dollars a month for fourteen years, to write me a book. He narrated everything out loud, all his life. His last, greatest narration he saved for the page, so it could last forever. And it will.