Monday the rabbi sat in Morts chair in our living room, and I held the envelope in my lap a long time, then slid my thumbnail under the flap, and there in Morts perfectly straight accountant hand were the words, the answer is yes, and below them the question I had never dared to ask out loud.
Fifty-three years ago, before we married under the chuppah at Beth Hillel, I had a dream I never told anyone, not even Mort, or so I thought. I wanted to open a little shop. Fabric, notions, a place for women to sit and sew and talk. I gave it up when the children came, and the years came, and it became one of those wishes you fold away so small you almost forget you ever had it.
But Mort had not forgotten. He wrote that I told him about the shop on our third date, in 1971, over coffee, and that I never mentioned it again in fifty-three years, but that he had watched me touch the fabric bolts every time we passed a store, watched my face, and known.
My careful accountant husband spent fifty-three years quietly saving toward a dream I mentioned exactly once on our third date, so that when he was gone I would not spend my widowhood folded up small, but doing the one thing I set aside to build a life with him.
The question on the page, the one he answered before I could ask, was, can I still do it, at my age, alone, without him. And Morts answer, in that straight careful hand, was yes. He had set aside the money, enough to rent the little space on Dempster Street two doors down from his old tax office, enough to stock it, enough to fail a few times and try again.
Ruth, he wrote, you spent your life making my dreams add up. The math always came out to you giving things up. I have been quietly balancing that ledger for fifty-three years, and now the account is yours. Open the shop. The answer to every doubt you are about to have is the same. Yes. Yes. Yes.
I opened the shop this spring. I call it Morts, because the women ask, and then I get to tell them about a man who did taxes for forty years and remembered a girls dream from a third date in 1971.
The rabbi comes by sometimes. He says a marriage is not the years, it is what one person keeps safe for the other when they are not looking. Mort kept my dream safe for fifty-three years. I sit in my little shop among the fabric bolts, and every time a doubt creeps in, I hear his answer, and it is always yes.