The Box My Husband Left Behind

I remembered that drawing. Josie had made it at the Dinner Bell, at the booth, that first supper, with the crayons off the kids’ menu. I thought it had been thrown away years ago. Walt had kept it. Walt had kept it for twenty years in a box behind a false back in his desk.

And the second thing, the last thing, at the very bottom, was an envelope with my name on it. Not Josie’s. Mine. RUTH, it said, in that blocky print. And under my name, smaller, he had written: TO BE GIVEN WHEN JOSIE IS GROWN, BY JOSIE’S OWN HAND. THEN SHE’LL KNOW. THEN YOU’LL KNOW.

Josie looked at me. “It’s addressed to you, Mama,” she said. “He wanted me to be the one to give it to you.” And she picked it up and she put it in my hands, and in that one small motion a dying man’s plan, twenty years in the making, finally came all the way true.

I could not open it there. I want to be honest about my own cowardice. I had carried Arlene’s sentence for seventeen years, he only asked you because there was no one else left, and I was afraid of what was in that envelope, afraid it would be some kind of thank-you to the hired-on, some kind of gentle instruction, and that it would confirm the thing I had believed in the dark for half my life. I put it in my apron pocket and I told Josie I would read it when I was by myself, and she understood, because she is her father’s daughter and she knows that some things a person has to meet alone.

I read it that night, at the kitchen table, under the hanging light, with the window fan turning the same as it had turned the day he asked me to promise. This is what it said. I have it by heart. I will have it by heart until they put me in the ground next to him.

“Ruth. If you’re reading this, then our girl is grown, and you got her there, and I knew you would. I am writing this in September and the doctor says I got weeks, and I am not scared of the dying so much as I am scared you’ll get it wrong about why I asked you what I’m fixing to ask you.

“I’m going to ask you to raise Josie. And I know you. You’ll say yes because you are the best woman I ever knew, and then you’ll spend the rest of your life thinking you were second best. You’ll think I asked you because Dana was gone and you were handy. My sister will see to it you think that. Arlene loves Josie but Arlene has got a mean streak a mile wide and she will work on you, Ruth, she will tell you you’re not the real thing. So I am writing this down so that someday, when our girl puts it in your hand, you will have it in my own writing and you can’t argue with a dead man.