Last night, after three sleepless nights, I poured my coffee, sat down by the phone, and dialed the number at the bottom of that page.
A woman answered, younger than me by a good deal, and when I said my wifes name her voice broke before mine did. She asked if she could come to the house. She said there were things a person should not hear over a telephone. So the next afternoon she sat at my kitchen table, the same table where I had held that envelope for an hour, and she told me who my wife had been.
Her name was Carol, and thirty years ago she had been a young mother with a sick little girl and no way on earth to pay for the medicine that kept the child alive.
My wife had been buying a strangers medicine, every single month, for twenty years, and never told a living soul, not even me.
It started at a pharmacy counter, Carol said. My wife had been in line behind her the day the pharmacist told Carol the price and watched her put the medicine back with shaking hands. My wife paid for it right there, quiet, and then she learned the childs name, and she set up an arrangement with that pharmacy that ran for twenty years. A little every month. Enough to keep a girl alive.
I thought of all the years I teased my wife for clipping coupons, for turning off lights, for driving that old car until the doors would barely shut. I thought she was just frugal, the way people who grew up with little stay frugal. She was frugal so that a girl she owed nothing to would live to grow up.
Carol asked my wife once why she did it. My wife told her only this: that she had lost a sister young, to something the money of the time could not reach, and that if she could keep one other family from that particular grief, then her whole life would have been worth the living.
The girl is a grown woman now. She is a nurse, Carol said. She works the childrens ward at the hospital, and she tells the frightened mothers there that somebody once did an impossible kindness for her, so impossible kindnesses are real, and they must not give up hope.
She did not learn my wifes name until the funeral notice ran in the paper. That is why the letter came. That is why the one word on the envelope was thank you.
They both came to see me on Sunday, Carol and her nurse daughter, and we sat and cried and laughed at my kitchen table, and for the first time in two years the house did not feel empty.
My wife saved a life every month for twenty years. I get to spend the rest of mine telling people she lived.