My husband had nine days left when he grabbed my wrist and asked me to go find the man I’d waited thirteen months for at nineteen. “Find Andy Sikora,” Greg said. “Give him what’s in my green tackle box, and don’t hate me until he’s done talking.” In forty-four years of marriage he had never once said that name.
Greg was sixty-nine, and the hospice bed had been in our front room since the middle of September.
We moved his recliner out to the garage to make it fit.
He slept most of every day by then, so when his eyes were open and clear like that, I listened.
“Why would I go looking for Andy?” I said.
“Because I owe him,” Greg said. “And I owe you worse.”
“What’s in the box, Greg?”
He let go of my wrist and looked up at the ceiling fan.
“Ask him,” he said.
The nurse came at ten with a new patch, and he slept, and he never came back clear again.
He died on a Thursday at 4:10 in the morning with the weather channel still on.
Forty-four years.
I have to tell you about Andy or none of the rest makes sense.
The summer I turned nineteen, Andy Sikora and Greg Boland loaded trucks at the same lumberyard, and Andy was the one I couldn’t stop looking at.
My mother couldn’t stand him. She burned a birthday card he sent me in the kitchen sink.
That fall he got hired on at a refinery two states away, and he said he’d have an apartment and come get me by Easter.
So I wrote him every SINGLE Sunday.
I gave the letters to Greg, because Greg drove past the post office on his way to the yard and my mother read everything that left our house.
Greg was helpful like that.
Thirteen months, and I never got one word back.
Not a card. Not a phone call.
Greg was the one who drove me home the winter my car died.
Greg was the one who said, “He’s not coming back for you, Tru. I’m sorry.”
He asked me to marry him that August, in his truck outside the feed store, and I said yes.
Brittney came three years later.
So when a dying man tells you to go find the boy who never wrote, you don’t sleep much.
After the funeral Brittney stayed five days, then flew home to her own kids.
The house got very quiet.
On Tuesday I went out to the garage.
The green tackle box was under his workbench, right where it had sat for my whole marriage.
I had never opened it.
It was his, the way the truck was his.
The top tray had lures, a spool of line, and a bottle opener from a bank that closed in 1996.
Under the tray, wrapped in a shop rag, was a gray velvet ring box with a dent in the lid.
Inside was a thin gold band with a diamond about the size of a pencil point.
I’ve worn my own ring every day since 1982. This was nobody’s I knew.
I called Brittney.
“Mom, maybe it was Grandma’s,” she said.
“Your grandma never owned a diamond in her life, honey.”
She found him in twenty minutes anyway, in a church newsletter, a photo of a gray man flipping pancakes at a fundraiser.
He lived in Kewanee. Two hours and forty minutes from my driveway.
I drove up on Saturday with the ring box in my coat pocket and my hand on it the whole way.
His house was a white ranch with a wind spinner shaped like a rooster stuck in the flower bed.
I sat at the curb for forty minutes with the engine running.
Twice I put it in reverse.
Then the front door opened.
He was heavier and gray all the way through, but he still had the chipped front tooth.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“Andy. It’s Trudy.”
He held the screen door with one hand and didn’t move.
“Greg passed,” I said. “Two weeks ago Thursday. He told me to bring you this.”
I opened the box and held it up.
He didn’t look at the ring.
He looked at the dent in the lid, and he put his other hand flat on the doorframe.
“He kept it,” Andy said. “All this time, the son of a bitch KEPT it.”
“Andy, I have never seen this ring in my life.”
“I know you haven’t. I mailed it to Greg in April of 1980 so he could put it in your hand. Your mother burned anything with my name on it.”
“You sent it to Greg.”
“I sent everything to Greg. A letter a week, for a year.”
My mouth went dry.
“He told me you never wrote,” I said. “He told me YOU WEREN’T COMING BACK FOR ME.”
“He told me you’d gotten ENGAGED,” Andy said. “He said you sent the ring back and wanted me to quit calling.”
In April of 1980 nobody had asked me anything yet.
Greg asked in August.
My knees went, and I caught the porch rail with both hands.
Andy stepped out and took my elbow, the way you’d hold somebody on ice.
“I never got one letter from you either, Tru. NOT ONCE.”
I couldn’t answer him.
“There’s more,” he said. “Greg wrote to me in 1991. Come in and take a chair before you read what he did with yours.”
Andy’s kitchen table
His kitchen smelled like coffee that had sat on the burner since breakfast. He pulled out a chair for me and went down the hall.
He came back with one envelope, white, soft at the folds, postmarked March 1991. My husband’s handwriting was on the front.
I knew that handwriting from forty-four years of grocery lists.
“Read it,” Andy said. “I’m not going to read it to you.”
It was one page, in pencil.
Andy. I got your call. Don’t call my house again. I never mailed one letter she gave me. I have all fifty-six and I’ve read them more times than she has. She’s got everything she asked you for in them, every bit of it. She’s happy. Leave her be. G.
I read it twice and set it face down on his table.
“Fifty-six,” I said.
“Every Sunday for thirteen months,” Andy said. “That’s about right, isn’t it?”
It was exactly right. I’d kept count at nineteen, in pencil, on the inside of my closet door.
“He kept them,” I said.
“He kept them and he read them.” Andy sat down across from me. “So what did you ask me for, Tru? What’s he mean, everything you asked for?”
Sundays, 1979
I didn’t know. That’s an ugly thing to admit about your own words.
I wrote those letters at my mother’s kitchen table after church, while she did dishes and pretended not to watch. I wrote small so I could fit more on a page. I wrote about the yard and the weather and whose cousin got married. At the end of most of them I wrote what our house was going to have, because I was nineteen and he had promised Easter.
Forty-six years later I couldn’t have told Andy one thing off those lists.
Monday mornings I walked the envelope down to the end of our lane, and Greg’s truck would be sitting there with the engine going. He held his hand out the window for it. Once he told me my stamp was crooked and fixed it with his thumb.
That was Greg. He fixed things.
We got married in 1982. The next spring I went into the hospital to have Brittney, and when I carried her home, Greg had painted the whole kitchen yellow. School bus yellow. I stood in the doorway with the baby and laughed, and he looked so pleased with himself that I never told him I’d have picked white.
He had her name ready before I did. I’d been going back and forth for months. In the delivery room he said “Brittney” like it was already decided, and it fit her, so it was.
The summer after, he hung a porch swing facing the road.
In 1991, the spring Brittney was in second grade, he had our phone number changed and unlisted. He said a man selling siding wouldn’t quit calling. I made up a little song so she could learn the new number.
And in October 1996 he bought the recliner. Brown corduroy, from Sears. I remember the week because the bank on Main closed that same week and his sister Cecile lost the teller window she’d worked for thirty years. Nobody sat in that chair but Greg. Not Brittney, not the grandkids. In twenty-nine years I never once sat in it.
I told Andy about the kitchen and the swing. He listened with both hands around his coffee cup and didn’t say anything.
I left the ring on his table. It had been his to begin with.
When I pulled in at home it was after dark. Cecile’s Buick was in my driveway, and the garage light was on.
Cecile’s casserole dish
Cecile is seventy-three, four years older than Greg was. She ran his funeral like she ran the bank window, with a list and a pen behind her ear. She’d brought three casseroles that week. She was in my garage holding one of the empty dishes and looking at the recliner.
“I let myself in,” she said. “I needed my dish. Khalil’s coming Monday with the truck for the hospice bed, and he can haul this thing off while he’s here. Greg wanted it gone.”
“He never said that to me.”
“He said it to me. In September.” She put the dish under her arm. “Where’ve you been all day?”
I told her. Kewanee. The tackle box. The ring.
She set the dish down on the workbench.
“Trudy, he was on that patch for nine days. He’d have told you to drive to the moon.”
“He wasn’t on it yet. It was the morning before.”
“Then he bought you a ring once and lost his nerve and hid it, and that is the most Greg thing I ever heard.” She picked the dish back up. “Don’t make a story out of it.”
“Andy says Greg wrote him. In 1991.”
“Sikora’s back in it now?”
I hadn’t said his last name. I’d said Andy, the whole time. I’m sure of it, because I couldn’t say the other half out loud yet.
Cecile walked to her car and opened the door and looked at me over the roof.
“Let the dead keep something, Trudy. Khalil comes Monday.”
Box 114
Sunday I looked for fifty-six letters.
I did the hall closet and the attic and the cedar chest. I did the truck, under the seat and behind it. I did Greg’s dresser, every drawer, the socks rolled the way he rolled them. I found a tin of buttons and a pocketknife and a picture of a dog I don’t remember us ever owning.
No letters.
Then I did the file cabinet in the spare room. Greg kept his checkbook registers, every one since we married, in rubber bands by year. He kept everything with a number on it.
I started at the back. 1980 was in there too, from before me. The April page had a line in his small square writing: Box 114, $8.
April of 1980. The month Andy mailed the ring.
I pulled 1981. January, Box 114, $8. 1982, the same. I laid them out on the bed in a row. Every January for sixteen years, the box rent went up a dollar or two. Always paid. Never once mentioned at our kitchen table, the yellow one, where we did the bills together on the first of the month.
Greg didn’t do the bills with me. I did them while he read the paper. These were the ones he did alone.
I called Cecile. She picked up on the first ring.
“Cecile, what was box 114 at your bank?”
“Lord, Trudy. That was thirty years ago.”
“Greg paid rent on it from 1980 to 1996.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “Khalil can come in the morning instead. Seven. I’ll ride along. Let’s get that mess out of your garage.”
She hung up before I could tell her no.
I went back to the 1996 register. October. Closed 114. That was the week the bank went under.
Three lines down, same week: Sears, chair, $389.
The recliner
It was after eleven when I went out to the garage.
The recliner sat where we’d pushed it, against the freezer, with his reading glasses still folded on the arm. I moved the glasses to the workbench. Then I sat down in it.
Twenty-nine years, and it was just a chair. It smelled like him and like motor oil.
When I leaned back, something in the backrest didn’t give the way stuffing gives. It was flat, and it crackled.
I got Greg’s box cutter off the pegboard and tipped the chair forward onto its face. The back was corduroy stretched over a panel and stapled underneath. Somebody had pulled those staples once and put them back in a straight line, and Greg did everything in a straight line.
I cut along the bottom and reached in.
Two freezer bags, the big ones, taped flat to the frame. Envelopes, packed in tight. My handwriting on every one of them. Andy Sikora, and a box number at a refinery. A fifteen-cent stamp on each. Every stamp on straight.
None of them had a postmark. Every one had been slit along the top with a knife.
I sat on the cold floor and opened the first one I touched. November 1979. Four pages, small writing. The weather. The yard. And at the bottom, my old list.
Our kitchen is going to be yellow like a school bus so we wake up happy even in February.
Somebody had underlined it in pencil. In the margin, in small square writing: 6-83.
I opened another. A swing on the front porch facing the road so I can watch for you coming home. Underlined. 5-84.
Another. If we ever have a girl I want to call her Brittney. Don’t you laugh. Underlined. 8-83.
I don’t know how long I sat there. I opened all fifty-six. The cherry tree in the back yard, 4-86. The week at the lake, 7-88. Pancakes on Sunday nights. Him reading out loud to me from the paper. A dog that comes when you whistle. Forty-one things marked, by my count, with a month and a year beside each.
I had forgotten writing every one of them. I had been living in them for forty-four years.
The last envelope was dated the second Sunday in August, 1980.
This is the last one, Andy. If you don’t write back I’ll know, and I won’t bother you anymore.
There was a pencil mark under that line too.
8-17. Asked her.
At ten to seven, headlights came across the garage door. Two sets.
Seven in the morning
Khalil backed the truck up to the garage and Cecile got out of her Buick behind him. I hadn’t closed the door. I was still sitting on the floor with the bags.
Cecile looked at the chair face down on the concrete with its back cut open.
“Oh, Trudy,” she said. “Oh, you couldn’t leave it.”
Khalil stood in the driveway holding the dolly.
“He asked me to take that chair to the burn pile,” Cecile said. “In September, before the bed came. He asked ME. He said, Cec, burn it with what’s in it and don’t open it. Not you. He didn’t ask you to go digging in his things. And you went and found the one thing he spent his whole life keeping off you.”
She came in and stood over the bags.
“I typed the card for that box myself. April of 1980. He came to my window white as a sheet with a stack of your letters and a ring box and he said, what do I do, and I said burn them. He couldn’t. So I said, then keep them where she won’t ever look. And he did. And when the bank closed I carried them out of the vault in my purse and handed them to him in the parking lot, and he went straight to Sears.”
“And 1991,” I said.
“That boy called your house on a Tuesday night. Greg called me shaking. I told him what to write. I told him to change the number.” She put her hand flat on her chest. “I kept this family together. You had a good life out of those letters. You had a kitchen and a swing and a daughter, and a man who did every single thing you ever asked for. Look at this house. Name me one woman you know who got every single thing.”
“I asked Andy,” I said.
“Andy didn’t give you any of it. Greg did.”
Khalil said, “Grandma.”
“Not now, honey.”
“Grandma, you told him to say she got engaged? In April?”
Cecile didn’t answer him. She bent down and put her hand on the top bag.
“These are Greg’s,” she said. “Give them here and we’ll take the chair and that will be the end of it. Brittney never has to know where her name came from.”
I took the bag out from under her hand. Then the other one. I carried them out to my car and set them on the passenger seat and put the seatbelt across them.
Cecile followed me to the driveway.
“If you drive those to Kewanee,” she said, “don’t you come to Thanksgiving. Don’t you come to anything. I mean it. You’ll be the woman who dug up her own husband the week he was buried, and everybody in this town will hear it from me first.”
I went back in and got one envelope off the floor. The one with Brittney’s name in it. I folded it in half and put it in my coat pocket, where the ring box had ridden up and back.
Khalil was still holding the dolly.
“Where do I take it, Aunt Trudy?”
“The dump,” I said.
Kewanee, a Sunday
I drove up two Sundays later. Two hours and forty minutes, with fifty-five letters on the seat beside me and the seatbelt across them.
There was a gallon of white paint in my trunk. Cecile hadn’t called. Brittney had, twice, and I hadn’t told her about the envelope in my coat yet. I don’t know if I will.
The rooster was going around in the flower bed. Andy was on the porch before I got the engine off. He had on a clean shirt, ironed, and I could see the crease down the sleeve from the curb.
I handed him the bags.
He sat down on the top step and turned the first envelope over in his hands. He ran his thumb along the slit at the top, twice. Then he took out the pages and unfolded them.
“‘Dear Andy,'” he said. “‘It’s Sunday, and you’ve been gone four days.'”
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who still keeps a shoebox of old letters at the back of a closet.
For more complicated family heartbreak, read about the mother who let her calls ring out and the ex who said no man would choose her. And for one more unforgettable post-divorce twist, there’s the name carved above her porch.
