I did not have to move. Garrett was already across the room, his hand on the projector cord, and he did not pull it. He stood there with his shoulders shaking.
I clicked the second file myself. It was labeled in her careful hand, For Garrett. The screen went white, then blue, and there was Ruthanne at the kitchen table with her scarf, only this time the light was different, softer, a late afternoon in March.
She said, Hello, sweetheart. I am not angry. I want you to hear that first.
The hall was so still I could hear the ice melting in the pitchers. She said, I know you have been scared since February. You have been looking for something to do with your hands. You are your fathers boy that way. When he was frightened, he fixed the dishwasher.
Somebody laughed, a soft wet laugh, and then covered her mouth.
Ruthanne said, Garrett, you are going to be tempted to throw away what hurts. I did the same after my mother died. I put her sewing machine in the attic and did not look at it for eleven years. Do not do that. Let it hurt. Then play the tapes, one a year, on my birthday, and watch yourself grow up. You were an awfully good boy.
She said, I forgive you for whatever you are about to do. I love you very much. That is a wrap.
The screen went dark. And then my son, a grown man of forty-three with a mortgage and a bad back, sat down on a metal folding chair in the middle of the fellowship hall and put his head in his hands.
I crossed the floor. I did not say anything. I put my hand on his shoulder, the way I did when he fell off the bicycle, and he leaned into it.
Forty years she ended every tape by turning the camera on herself, and the last one was the only time she turned it on him.
Later, in the church kitchen, Ola made coffee and Garrett told me everything. He had been afraid. The doctor had given six weeks and the house was suddenly quiet, and the tapes were a doorway he could not walk through without breaking. He said he had meant to hide them, not destroy them, and by the time he understood the difference, he was holding them over the dumpster.
The tapes were not lost. Ola had pulled every shoebox out of the dumpster at six that same evening and put them in her garage, because her husband had seen Garrett at the bin and told her to go look. She had not said a word until now. She said, I thought you needed time. I told her she had given me more than that.
Garrett took the wedding band off his pinky and put it on the kitchen counter. He set the Buick keys beside it. I picked up the ring, and I told him I would hold it for him, and that when he married, it was his to give.
The credit union form was in order. Two hundred twelve thousand dollars passed to me, as Ruthanne signed in 2019. I did what I thought she would want. I opened accounts for each of my grandchildren, and I paid off the church roof loan, and I kept a little for the dishwasher.
Garrett came over on a Sunday in May with a laptop and a cable. We began at the beginning, 1982, the year we moved into the house. We watched a whole tape, front to back, without saying anything. At the end, she turned the camera around and said, That is a wrap, folks. Silas, pick up your socks.
My son laughed. I picked up my socks.