The Box My Daughter-In-Law Mocked At Christmas

“I decided a lot of things before I had the money to back them up,” he said, and he laughed the quiet way he laughed, mostly through his nose, and he reached over and took my hand, the hand that still wore the ring that thirty one dollars had bought, upgraded twice since but never replaced in my mind, because to me it was always the same ring. “Thirty one dollars doesn’t sound like much now. It took me three summers. I used to lie in bed and count it in my head before I fell asleep, like some boys count sheep.”

I did not know, sitting on that porch, that I would spend four nights three years after he died sanding that same box smooth again at my own kitchen table, trying to put back the finish that forty six years and one fourteen year old boy’s thumbprints had worn away. I only knew, listening to him that evening, that I had married a man who built the rest of his whole life the same patient way he had built that thirty one dollars, one dollar at a time, never touching it, never explaining himself to anybody who had not earned the explanation.

I am not a woman with a workshop. I have a kitchen table and a junk drawer and whatever my late husband left behind in the garage. I sanded that box down over four nights with sandpaper I already had, I rubbed it with a nine dollar can of Danish oil from the hardware store in town, and I replaced the brass hinge for four dollars because the old one had rusted through. I had a scrap of green velvet left over from a sewing project years back, enough to relined the inside myself with glue and a steady hand. All told, I spent about twenty two dollars and four nights of my evenings, and when I was done, that box looked the way it must have looked the day Wendell’s father handed it to him.

My granddaughter Emma had drawn my name out of the hat that December. She is fifteen, and she is the one grandchild who still asks me real questions about her grandpa instead of just nodding when his name comes up. I decided the box was for her. Not because it cost anything. Because it needed somebody who would ask about it.

And here is the part I am not proud of, but I am going to tell you anyway, because Sharon from the dispatch office down the road would ask me the same thing if she heard this story, and she would be right to ask it. Why didn’t I just tell Shay, right then, what the box was? Why did I sit there and let her hold it over her head?