My knees near gave, because inside the base of that dented coffee pot was a folded square of paper, and when I opened it I saw it was the deed to a small piece of land, a lakeside lot, paid in full, with Nadines note clipped to it.
I lowered myself onto the pantry step, the deed trembling in my hands.
It was a little parcel on the water, the very lake we had loved our whole lives, a spot with room for a dock and a bench and nothing else. She had bought it quietly, over time, and hidden the deed in the one place she was sure I would overlook.
She had been planning, she wrote, to give me the porch swing spot I never knew I wanted, a place on the water to put our old age, so that when I finally retired we could sit by the lake together and watch the sun go down over the fish I never caught.
Her note said: You bought me a porch swing this year. I bought you a place to put one, right on the water where we started. I was going to hand you this deed and watch your face when you realized the cheap coffee pot came with a lake. Surprise, you old grump. Now build us a bench and think of me.
We were supposed to grow old on that little lot together. She had made sure of it, in secret, and then her heart had stopped a month later, and I had almost thrown the deed away with a coffee pot I thought was junk.
I did not sell that land. I could never. Instead I did the thing she asked. I built a bench there myself, by hand, at the waters edge, on the lot my wife bought me and never got to see.
I hung the porch swing near it too, the one I had bought her, so that both our anniversary gifts finally came together on that quiet shore, the way she must have imagined them.
Now I go out to Nadines lot most evenings. I sit on the bench I built, or the swing I hung, and I watch the sun go down over the water where we began, and I am not entirely alone, because she is in every board and every ripple and every fish that jumps.
I make my morning coffee in that ten-dollar percolator still, and then I drive out to the lake she gave me. The cheapest-looking thing my wife ever handed me came with a piece of the water we loved and a place to grow old, and though she is not here to grow old beside me, I keep our spot the way she wanted it, and I will until the day I join her there for good.