The Box My Husband Left Behind
Josie had not opened it. That is the kind of girl she is. She had found a box her dead father made and addressed to her and she had carried it to me unopened, because, she said, “I didn’t want to do it without you.”
My hands were shaking. I want you to picture a fifty-year-old woman, a woman who has wrung out more washcloths and buried more hopes than she can count, sitting at a kitchen table shaking like a girl. Josie sat down next to me and she lifted the little brass hook, and she opened the lid.
Inside, on top, was a stack of envelopes held together with a rubber band that had gone brittle and snapped the moment she touched it. There were maybe a dozen of them. Each one had writing on the front in Walt’s blocky mechanic’s print, the print I would have known anywhere, the print off a thousand repair tickets. They were labeled. “JOSIE ON HER WEDDING DAY.” “JOSIE WHEN SHE HAS HER FIRST BABY.” “JOSIE WHEN SHE’S SAD AND DON’T KNOW WHY.” “JOSIE WHEN SHE BUYS HER FIRST CAR, CHECK THE OIL, BABY.” That last one made her laugh and cry at the same time, which is the only honest way to do either one, I have come to think.
He had known. He had known he was dying with time enough to do this, to sit at that rolltop desk in the back of his shop, in the evenings I thought he was just doing the books, and write letters to a daughter he would never see grow up. He had written himself into her whole life. He had made sure he would be there for the car and the wedding and the first baby and the sad days with no name. A dying man, sitting alone in a cinder-block building, refusing to be absent.
I could not speak. Josie was crying so hard she could not read, so she handed them to me, and I read them out loud, one at a time, my voice breaking on every other line, both of us holding hands across Walt’s handwriting. I will not tell you everything those letters said. Some of it belongs only to Josie and her daddy. But I will tell you about the last two.
Under all the letters to Josie, at the very bottom of the box, were two more things.
The first was a folded piece of paper, soft as cloth from being folded and refolded, and when I opened it I saw it was a child’s drawing. Crayon. A stick-figure house with a crooked chimney, and three stick figures out front holding hands, a tall one in brown, a middle one in a triangle dress, and a small one, and over the small one it said JOSIE in the backwards-S printing of a four-year-old, and over the tall one it said DADY, and over the middle one, the one in the triangle dress, it said MAMA RUTH.