because my father had poured concrete over the one thing his pride would never let him fix, and now his mind was gone and only I could fix it for him.
Down in that hollow, wrapped in a feed sack, was a shoebox, and it was full of a friendship. Photographs of my father as a young man, arm around another fellow at ballgames and fish fries and on the hoods of old cars, grinning, thick as brothers across twenty years. Letters between them. A pocketknife with two sets of initials scratched in it. And on top, in my fathers hand, a single folded page.
Me and Ray had thirty years and I threw it away over money and pride and I was too stubborn to fix it and now too much time has gone by. I cannot look at this box and I cannot burn it. So I am putting it under here. Maybe one of my kids will be a better man than me someday and make it right.
My father and a man named Ray were best friends the whole first half of their lives. Then, decades back, they had a falling-out, the kind that starts over a loaned truck and hardens into something neither man will bend on. And my father, too proud to knock on a door and say he was sorry, sealed thirty years of the best friendship of his life under a slab of concrete in his shed, and let it eat at him quiet for the rest of his days.
He waved us off every time we asked about that patch of concrete. Just Dad being Dad. It was the grave of the thing he most regretted and could never say.
His mind is mostly gone now. He could not fix this if he tried, and he cannot try. So I did what his note asked. I went and found Ray.
He is still living, across the county, and when I told him who I was and what I had found under my fathers shed, he had to sit down. He said he had wanted to reach out for thirty years and was every bit as stubborn and sorry, that not a week went by he did not think about my dad.
I drove Ray to the care home, not knowing if my father would even know him. But when that old man walked into the room, something crossed my fathers face, some light from way down deep, under all the fog, and he said one word. He said Ray. First name he has come up with on his own in months.
They sat together most of the afternoon. My father does not have many words left, but he did not need them. Ray held his hand and talked about the old days, the ballgames and the fish fries, and my father smiled and smiled.
My dad buried the best thing he ever had under concrete because he was too proud to say sorry. I busted it open with a sledgehammer, thirty years too late for them and just barely in time. Ray comes every week now. Some things you can still fix, even at the very end. You just have to be willing to swing the hammer.