Because there, laid flat in the dark beneath the false bottom, were small parcels, each one wrapped in plain paper and tied with string, and each one labeled in the blocky hand of my husband with a year.
I counted them with trembling fingers. There was one for every year of our marriage. Forty of them.
And tucked among them, a note.
You always said I was no good with words, he wrote, and you were right, so every year I bought you something small and hid it here, meaning to give you all of them at once someday, on some grand occasion I kept putting off, and if you are finding them now, then I am a fool who waited too long, and I am sorry.
Forty years of gifts. A small thing for every anniversary of a marriage he never once had the words to celebrate out loud. A little brooch. A pair of earrings. A silk scarf. A locket. Bought with love, wrapped with care, hidden in the one place he was sure I would never look, waiting for a grand day that never came.
He died before he gave me a single one.
I sat on the garage step and I cried until I had no more crying in me. My gruff, silent husband, who I sometimes feared did not feel things as deeply as I did, had loved me so much, and so quietly, that he built a secret shrine to forty years of it under a tray of wrenches.
I open one now, on each anniversary. Twenty-six years he has been gone, and every year on our day I unwrap the gift he bought me for that year, and I hear him, at last, saying the thing he never could.
I have years of them left. Years of my husband still loving me, one wrapped parcel at a time, from the other side of everything.
My daughter asked me why I do not just open them all at once and be done with the ache of it. I told her I would sooner starve than eat a whole feast in one sitting, when it is the only feast I have left. One a year. One anniversary at a time. It is the last conversation I get to have with him, and I will make it last as long as I possibly can.
He gave me forty years of gifts and a lifetime of quiet love, and he found a way to keep giving both long after he was gone. A man no good with words. I never knew a poem like the one he built under a tray of wrenches.
He thought he was no good with words. He was better than he ever knew. It just took him forty years, and a false bottom, and my own two hands finally opening the box he could not bear for me to open while he lived.
I was loved. Oh, I was loved. I only wish I had known how much while he was here to tell.