The Red Scarf I Kept in Cedar

Joleen

I met Joleen at a church supper in Grand Island in 1976, and I married her the next spring. She was the kindest and straightest person I have ever known. She laughed with her whole face, she kept a garden that looked like an argument she had won, and she knew within a month that I had a place in me with a closed door on it.

“There’s a girl,” she said once. We were doing dishes. I was drying.

“There was.”

“Do you still love her?”

I thought about it honestly. “I love who she was. I don’t know her anymore.”

“That’s allowed,” Joleen said, and handed me a glass.

My mother kept the scarf. I left it with her when I came home from the Navy in 1975, and she put it in her cedar chest between two sheets of tissue paper. Years before, in the winter of 1970, she had taken a needle and some darker red yarn and mended the rip from the barbed wire, neat as a surgeon. I did not ask her to. She said it was a shame to let a good thing be damaged. When she died in 1998, the chest came to me.

I told Joleen in December of 2022. I did not plan to. She was in the house with the hospice nurse, the bed turned toward the window, and one afternoon she woke and asked me, out of nowhere, what was in the cedar chest. I told her all of it, the ice and the gloves and the girl at the lockers, badly, with long pauses.

When I had finished she was quiet so long I thought she had gone back to sleep. Then she said, “Did you ever thank her?”

“No.”

“Well.” She opened her eyes. They were a very pale blue by then. “Stan Tyree, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

She died on the twelfth of January, 2023, a Thursday. I will not tell you about that. I will tell you she made me promise one thing in the last week, and I said, I’ll think about it, which is what a man says when he has already decided to try. She said, “When I’m gone, you go find that girl and you tell her. And you do it before you’re too old to climb the steps.”

Joleen’s birthday is the second of November. She would have been seventy-one this week.

The List

I almost did not go to the reunion. The letter came from Gretchen Fiske in September and I put it on the refrigerator. In October the reminder card came with the list of who had said yes. Marvene Varley Hartzell, it said, in Gretchen’s slanted hand. Widow of Rollin. I filled out my card in blue ink and mailed it before I could change my mind.

I’ll tell you what I planned, so you can see how well a plan holds up. I planned to say hello, say I was sorry about Rollin, and ask her to lunch. If that went well, I planned to give her the scarf at some quiet table in a month, with no one watching, and never make her feel she owed me anything.

On Thursday the fifteenth I called her house. I got her number from Gretchen, who gave it to me and then said, “Stanton Tyree, if you hurt that woman I will find you.” Gretchen is seventy-two years old and weighs a hundred and ten pounds. I believed her.

The phone rang four times. She answered. I said her name, then mine, and I heard how it sounded in the air, an old man asking for a seat. She said she would save me one. I put the phone down, sat on the edge of the bed, and said out loud, “Joleen, I called her.”