The Box My Daughter-In-Law Mocked At Christmas

He was fourteen when his father gave it to him, an old wooden cigar box with a brass hinge that his father had smoked the cigars out of one at a time over a decade of Sunday dinners. Wendell kept his lawn mowing money in it. Not in a bank. In that box, under his bed, because he did not trust banks yet and he did trust that box. He mowed eleven lawns a summer for three summers, and he kept every dollar of it in there, folded in half, until he had thirty one dollars saved, which back then was not a small sum for a boy his age.

He used that thirty one dollars, plus what he’d saved since, to buy my wedding ring. Not the ring I wear now, that came later when we could afford better, but the first one, the one he put on my finger in his mother’s kitchen before he’d even asked my father properly, because he was seventeen and I was sixteen and we were both too impatient to do things in the right order.

He kept the box his whole life. It sat on his dresser for forty six years. After he died, I could not look at it for months. Then one night last fall, I pulled it down, and I noticed the felt lining inside had gone to pieces, and the brass hinge was green with age, and I thought, I am going to fix this box, because it is the one thing of his I can still fix.

He only told me the whole story of that box once, properly, all the way through, and it was on our fortieth anniversary, sitting on the back porch with two cups of coffee going cold between us because neither of us wanted to break the quiet to go warm them up. I had asked him, half teasing, why he never got rid of that old thing, since the hinge squeaked and the lid did not sit flush anymore even then.

“Because it’s the only thing I ever built something out of nothing with,” he said. “Eleven lawns a summer. Mr. Pruitt paid a dollar fifty, old Widow Hastings paid two because she liked having somebody young around to talk to while he worked. I’d come home smelling like cut grass and gasoline and I’d fold every dollar in half and put it in that box under my bed, and I never once touched it, not for a baseball glove, not for anything, because I had already decided what it was for before I’d saved the first dollar.”

“You decided you were marrying me before you’d saved the first dollar,” I said.