The Boy Carl Wrote to for Twenty Years

Here is what I learned about my husband from that pad, forty-seven years into our marriage.

He could write.

I had never seen it. In all that time Carl wrote me one thing, a birthday card with a bird on it, and in the margin it said To M. Happy Birthday. C. When our son-in-law asked him to say a few words at the rehearsal dinner he stood up and said, “Welcome, eat,” and sat back down.

But on that pad he went on for pages. He was funny. He was gentle. He tried to explain snow to a boy who had never seen any, and it took him four tries.

Snow is frozen rain but it does not fall like rain. It comes down slow, like feathers out of a pillow. It is quiet. That is the main thing.

Crossed out.

When the first snow comes, our dog Skip stands in the yard with his mouth open like he’s waiting for someone to feed him. He is a beagle. He is not smart. But he knows it is something.

That one he had underlined and put a check mark beside, and that was the one he mailed. Mateo’s next letter said, I laughed at your dog. I am trying to imagine so much quiet.

I put my hand over my mouth.

The truck fund

I am not proud of the first thing I felt.

It was not tenderness. Tenderness came later. The first thing was a plain, hot feeling of being left out of my own house.

Forty-seven years we had been married. I thought I knew where every dollar of that man’s went. And here was a whole corner of his life I could not have found with a flashlight.

Then I thought about the truck.

For as long as I could remember, Carl had said he was saving for a new truck. He fixed mowers and chain saws and the occasional outboard motor in the garage for neighbors, cash only, and every dollar of it went into what he called the truck fund. He drove a 1998 Ford with a driver’s door that had to be lifted by the handle before it would latch. I teased him about that fund every Christmas. “How’s the truck fund, Carl?” “Coming along,” he would say, and go back to his coffee.

There never was a truck.

I did the arithmetic sitting on that floor. Thirty-two dollars a month at the start, I would find out. Forty-five at the end. A little under ten thousand dollars over twenty years, which is a lot to a man who drives a 1998 Ford.

And what bothered me was not the money. Had he come to me in 2005 and said, “Marilyn, I would like to help a boy in Guatemala, and it’ll cost us thirty-two dollars a month,” I would have said yes before he finished the sentence. I would have gone for the checkbook. He knew that. After forty-seven years he knew exactly what I would say.