The Box My Husband Left Behind
Arlene softened over the years, I will give her that. Grief does strange things, and so does time. By the time Josie was in high school, Arlene and I had worked out a kind of truce, built mostly around the fact that we both loved the same girl and were both getting older and were both, if I am honest, a little lonely. She would have us for Sunday dinner. She taught Josie to make the beaten biscuits that nobody under sixty can make anymore. She came to the graduations. We never spoke of the kitchen table, or the sentence in the doorway, and I think she had half forgotten it the way you forget a cruelty you never had to pay for. But I had not forgotten. I had built a house on it.
Josie grew up good. I say that and I know every mother says it, but Josie grew up good the way her daddy was good, honest and slow and kind to the kids who cut through. She went to the community college in Madisonville and got her associate’s in nursing, and she came back home and took a job at the county hospital, and she met a quiet boy named Caleb Short who farmed his daddy’s tobacco and soybeans out past the Trace County line and who looked at Josie the way Walt used to look at a thing he was fixing to spend the rest of his life on.
They set the wedding for the first Saturday in October, at Pine Grove, in the little white church where I had married her father twenty years before.
Now I have to tell you about the box.
About a month before the wedding, Josie came by the house on Pigeon Fork Road. I still lived there. I had never seen the sense in leaving a house that had Walt’s handprints in the concrete of the back step and Josie’s height marks on the pantry door frame. She came in with a cardboard box in her arms, and she set it on the kitchen table, and she said, “Mama, I found something.”
She had been cleaning out the shop. Mercer Small Engine had sat closed since Walt died. I had rented the land to a man who ran a lawn care business out of the building, but the little office in the back, with Walt’s rolltop desk and his girly calendars from parts suppliers and his coffee can of bolts, I had never been able to touch. Josie had decided, with her wedding coming, that it was time. She was going to turn the office into something. She was always more practical than me.
In the bottom of the rolltop, behind a false back that she only found because she dropped a pencil and heard it rattle somewhere it should not have, she found a wooden box. Walt had made it. I knew his work the second I saw it, the dovetails he was so proud of, the finish he rubbed on by hand. It was about the size of a Bible box, cherry wood, with a little brass hook latch. And burned into the lid, with the woodburning pen he kept for marking his tools, were the words: FOR JOSIE, WHEN SHE’S A WOMAN GROWN.