My best friend of forty-one years sat down on the porch swing my late husband built and asked me for one last picture of the two of us. When I laughed at the word last, she said, “Because after tomorrow, you won’t want my face anywhere near this house.” I asked what my husband had to do with it, and she shut her eyes.
Sherry has had a key to my front door for thirty-one years, and since the funeral she’s been the only person I let use it.
Francis died a year ago this Saturday, out in the garage, with a rake in his hand.
Sixty-eight. His heart.
We’d been married forty-four years.
After that I quit church and let the phone ring until it stopped.
Sherry didn’t let me disappear.
She came every Thursday with a pot of chili or soup and sat at my table until I ate some of it.
Her mug lived in my cabinet. The green one with the chipped handle, third shelf, right beside his.
We met when I was twenty-four, both of us working the drive-up window at a credit union in Muncie.
Francis came through my lane every Friday with his paycheck, and he was the one who told me to be nice to her.
“New girl looks like she hasn’t slept in a year,” he said. “Take her to lunch, Mel.”
So I did.
And I kept taking her, for four decades.
When Doug walked out on her in 1986, she had a two-year-old named Travis and a furnace that quit the same week.
Francis drove over there with his toolbox before I even asked him to.
He and I tried for nine years to have our own.
It never happened.
So Travis became the closest thing we had to one.
Francis taught him to drive in the church parking lot, the one with the basketball hoop that never had a net.
At the funeral, Travis got up to say a few words and couldn’t get through his second sentence.
I loved him for that.
Here’s the part I hadn’t told anybody.
In May, cleaning out Francis’s desk, I found a rubber-banded stack of old check registers.
Three hundred dollars a month. Memo line blank.
Every single month from the spring of 1986 to the fall of 2002.
Years ago I’d asked him about it once, and he’d said he was helping his brother out west.
I believed him. I believed everything Francis ever told me.
So I put the registers back in the drawer and shut it.
Last Thursday was warm for October, so we took our coffee out to the swing.
It still squeaks on the left chain. Francis promised to fix that for thirty-some years.
Sherry hadn’t said ten words since she came in.
She kept flipping her phone over in her lap.
Face down. Face up. Face down.
Then she held out her hand.
“Let me see your phone, Mel.”
“What for?”
“I want a picture of us. One last one.”
I laughed. “Last? Are you running off on me?”
She didn’t laugh back.
She held my phone out at arm’s length, and on the little screen I could see both of our faces.
Mine was smiling.
Hers wasn’t even trying.
She took it anyway. Four times.
Then she set my phone down on the slat between us like it had burned her.
“Sherry. What is going on with you?”
She stared at the street for a long time.
“Travis is coming over tomorrow at ten,” she said. “He’s bringing you something.”
“Okay. Bringing me what?”
“An envelope. Francis handed it to me two weeks before he died. He made me swear I’d wait a year.”
My coffee was still in my hand.
I didn’t drink any more of it.
“My husband wrote me a letter and gave it to YOU?”
She pressed her lips together until they went pale.
“I tried to tell you myself,” she said. “Every Thursday. I’d hang up my coat and think, today. And then you’d get my mug down off the shelf.”
“Tell me WHAT, Sherry?”
“After tomorrow you’re going to know what I am. And you won’t want my face anywhere near this house.”
Something in my stomach turned over.
Three hundred dollars.
The spring of 1986.
The spring Doug left. The spring Francis carried his toolbox across town without being asked.
And 2002 was the year Travis turned eighteen.
I set my cup down on the porch boards very carefully, because my hands had stopped feeling like mine.
“Sherry,” I said. “Look at me.”
She wouldn’t.
“Those checks. EVERY MONTH for SIXTEEN YEARS. Were they for YOUR SON?”
She shut her eyes.
Both of her hands went flat on the slat, one on each side of my phone, like somebody holding a table on a boat.
“Answer me.”
“Ten o’clock,” she said. “Please just be home.”
Then she got up, and the left chain squeaked, and she walked down my steps to her car without her coat.
I picked up my phone and opened the pictures.
In all four of them, Sherry wasn’t looking at the screen. She was looking past me, at the garage.
The side door
I hadn’t been inside the garage since the morning the ambulance backed out of the driveway.
Francis kept the side door locked. The key hung on a nail by my back door on a loop of baling twine, and it had hung there a whole year without me touching it.
I touched it now. I walked across the yard with my phone in one hand and that key in the other, and I let myself in.
The rake was leaning against the workbench. One of the paramedics must have stood it there.
His red toolbox sat on the bench, right under the window. The window Sherry had been staring at from my swing.
I had never opened that toolbox in my life. You didn’t go in Francis’s toolbox any more than you went in his wallet.
I lifted the lid.
Taped to the inside of it, in two rows, were Travis’s school pictures.
Kindergarten, with the cowlick. Second grade, no front teeth. The year of the braces. The year Sherry cut his hair herself and he wore a stocking cap to school for a month.
I had a copy of every one of those in an album in my hall closet, because Sherry gave me one each fall.
Francis had his own set. Taped where he’d see them every time he reached for a wrench.
I counted. Twelve. Kindergarten through eleventh grade.
A can of WD-40 sat next to the toolbox with the little red straw still taped to its side.
The thirteenth spot on the lid, where the senior picture should have gone, was empty. Four squares of yellow tape around a rectangle of clean red paint.
Everything else on that bench had a year of dust on it.
That rectangle didn’t.
Lane two
The credit union in Muncie had four drive-up lanes, and in 1985 I had lane two.
Francis came through every Friday at twenty to five with his paycheck from the plant. He’d send it through the drawer and take two Tootsie Rolls out of the jar we kept for kids. One for him, and one he left in the drawer for me.
That October, Mr. Kemp, the branch manager, put a new girl in lane three.
Nobody got a window at that branch without a year in the lobby first. I’d done fourteen months in the lobby. Sherry walked in on a Monday and had a drawer by noon.
When I asked her how she managed that, she kept counting twenties and didn’t look up.
“Somebody put in a word,” she said.
She never would say who. I figured her father, or a pastor. Kemp played cards Tuesday nights with half the men in town, Francis included, so it could have been anybody.
That Friday Francis said what he said about the new girl, and Monday I took her to the Burger Chef across the street. She ate half a fish sandwich and showed me a picture out of her wallet. A baby in a sailor suit with his hair standing straight up in back.
“Travis,” she said. “He doesn’t sleep. So I don’t.”
That Christmas Francis came home from a craft fair at the high school with two mugs in a paper sack. A brown one for himself. A green one.
“For your friend,” he said.
“How do you know she likes green?”
“Everybody likes green, Mel.”
She did, it turned out. She drank out of that mug in my kitchen for the next forty years.
Saturdays back then I drove down to Anderson to do my mother’s hair and her groceries. I’d come home at suppertime and Francis would have sawdust in his hair from whatever he was building, and I’d stand behind his chair and pick it out.
Then March of 1986. Doug gone, and the furnace in Sherry’s duplex dead the same week, with a two-year-old in the house and frost on the inside of the windows.
I told Francis about it at supper. He got up before I finished and went out to the garage for his toolbox.
He was backing down the driveway before I thought to run out and tell him which street she lived on.
He didn’t roll the window down. He just waved.
I stood in the driveway in my socks and decided Sherry must have given him directions at the window some Friday.
I believed that for forty years, the same way I believed in his brother out west.
So that was what I had. A husband in the ground, a friend who came on Thursdays, and a boy who wasn’t mine but was the closest I ever got.
I locked the garage and went back in the house.
Sherry’s coat was still on the hook by my front door.
The green tape
It was her navy wool coat, the good one, and the right pocket hung lower than the left.
I called her first. I’m not proud of the order I did things in, but I did call her first.
It rang until it stopped. I called again and it rang until it stopped again.
That had been my trick for a whole year. Now I knew what it sounded like from the other end.
So I put my hand in the pocket.
A ring of keys. Not her car key, that was on its own fob and had gone home with her. These were the rest. Her own front door. Her mailbox. A little plastic Kroger tag.
My front door key was on there, with the blue rubber cap I put on it in 1995 so she could find it in the dark.
And one more. A small brass key with a strip of green electrical tape wrapped around the head.
I had given that woman exactly one key in my life.
I took the ring out the back door and across the yard. It was dark by then, and the motion light over the garage came on and showed me the side door.
I put the brass key in the lock.
It turned on the first try.
9:40 at night
I sat at the kitchen table with both keys in front of me until it was twenty to ten.
Then I called Travis.
He picked up on the first ring, like he’d been holding the phone.
“Aunt Mel.”
He’s called me that since he could talk. Francis was Uncle Fran. Nobody ever asked him to.
“Your senior picture,” I said. “The one off the inside of Francis’s toolbox. Who took it?”
He didn’t say anything for so long I looked at the screen to see if the call had dropped.
“You went in the garage,” he said.
“I went in the garage.”
“Mom’s not answering you.”
“No.”
“She’s not answering me either.” He let out a breath. “Aunt Mel, I’m supposed to bring the envelope. That’s all I’m supposed to do.”
“Travis. You stood up at his funeral and couldn’t get past your second sentence. What was it going to be?”
A car went by on his end. His kitchen window faces the road.
“I was sixteen,” he said. “We were in the church lot. I’d just backed between the cones without hitting one, first time ever, and he made me turn the engine off. And he told me.”
“Told you what.”
“You know what. You’ve got the checks. Mom said you found the checks.”
I hadn’t told Sherry about the checks. I hadn’t told a soul.
“How does your mother know what’s in my desk?”
“She said she could tell. She said you quit looking at her the same way sometime in May.”
I put my free hand flat on the table.
“Twenty-six years,” I said. “You’ve known twenty-six years, and I pinned your boutonniere on at your wedding.”
“At the funeral I was going to say, ‘He was my dad.’ I got as far as ‘He was,’ and I looked down and there you were in the front row.”
Neither one of us said anything for a while.
“So what’s in the envelope, if you already know all that?”
“I don’t know. He sealed it himself. He said it wasn’t for me.”
Ten o’clock
He was early. His truck pulled up at the curb at eight minutes to ten.
He came up the walk with a long white envelope and nothing else, and he stopped at the bottom of the steps like he needed to be asked.
“Come on up,” I said.
He sat on the right side of the swing, where his mother had sat. The left chain squeaked.
The envelope said MEL on the front in Francis’s carpenter-pencil printing, all capitals, the way he wrote on two-by-fours. The flap was sealed and he’d put a strip of masking tape across it besides. That was Francis.
I opened it with my thumbnail.
Two sheets of yellow legal paper, folded in thirds.
Mel,
If you’re reading this I never got the nerve up, and Sherry kept her word, which she always does.
Travis is my son. It was one summer, 1983, and it was over before he was born. Doug figured it out in the spring of ’86 and left. If you’ve found the checks by now, and you will, you never could leave a drawer alone, they were for Travis.
I’d left that drawer alone for five months. I wanted to tell him so.
Here’s the part Sherry has wanted to tell you for forty years and I wouldn’t let her.
I got her on at the credit union. I told Kemp at cards that I’d move our accounts, and every man at that table would move his, if she didn’t have a window by Monday. Then I came through your lane and told you to take her to lunch.
I wanted to see my boy grow up. The only way I could figure to do that and keep you was to put her next to you. So I did. Every Friday I came through your lane and asked about the new girl, and you’d tell me how the baby was sleeping.
She didn’t want any of it. That’s on me.
The lunches were real. I watched them get real.
Don’t take it out on her.
F.
I read it twice. The second time I only read the part about Fridays, because I could see myself in that window, leaning on the drawer with my elbow, telling him Travis had cut a tooth. And Francis nodding like he was being polite.
Travis had his eyes on the porch boards.
“He got her that job so she’d be my friend,” I said.
“He got her that job so I’d have a furnace.”
“He got her that job and then he sent me to lunch.”
Travis didn’t answer that one.
Down at the curb, the passenger door of his truck opened.
The bottom step
Sherry came up the walk in a gray sweatshirt with no coat and stopped at the bottom step.
She didn’t come up. She’d told me she wouldn’t.
“He wrote that it was all him, didn’t he,” she said. “I knew he would. He read it to me before he sealed it, and I told him it was a lie, and he sealed it anyway.”
I held up the yellow paper. I didn’t say anything.
“It wasn’t all him, Mel. I could have quit that window any day I wanted. Kemp would’ve been tickled. I didn’t quit. I took the job and I took the lunches and I took his three hundred dollars every month for sixteen years, and I sat in your kitchen and drank out of the mug he bought me.”
“Mom,” Travis said.
“Don’t. You sit there.” She pointed at him without looking at him. “You want to know about that garage key? He gave it to me in ’86. So I could drop Travis off on Saturdays while you were down in Anderson doing your mother’s hair. They’d be out there all day building birdhouses. Seven years of Saturdays, Mel. And you’d come home and pick the sawdust out of his hair.”
I used to stand behind his chair to do it.
“And the picture,” she said. “Yes. I took it. The week of the funeral, while you were lying down in the back bedroom. I came in your front door with your key and went out your back door and let myself in his garage, and I took my son’s picture off his toolbox. It’s the only one there is of the two of them. Francis is in it. He’s got his arm around him in the cap and gown, and nobody was ever allowed to put that on a wall.”
She opened her purse and took it out and held it against her sweatshirt with both hands.
“Forty-four years you had him,” she said. “You had the house. You had the name on the mailbox and the front row at the funeral. I had one summer. I had three hundred dollars and your Thursdays. So don’t you stand up there looking at me like I stole something out of your garage. I had a right to one goddamn picture.”
Travis had stood up. The swing went back and knocked the wall.
Nobody said anything.
I went inside. Her coat was on the hook where it had hung all night. I worked my front door key off her ring, and then the brass one with the green tape, and put them both in my sweater pocket, and put the ring back in her coat.
I carried the coat down the steps and held it out to her.
She looked at it. Then she looked at my pocket.
“Thirty-one years,” she said. “And you’re taking the key.”
“Keep the picture,” I said.
She took the coat. She didn’t put it on. She walked back to the truck and got in the passenger side and shut the door, and I stayed on the bottom step where she’d been standing.
Travis came down behind me.
I took the brass key out of my pocket and put it in his hand.
He looked at the green tape a long time.
“Thursday?” he said.
The left chain
Thursday it rained in the morning and quit by noon.
Travis came at one and went out to the garage, and I heard him in there a long while before I heard him do anything.
When he came out he had the red toolbox. He set it on the porch boards and opened it, and I could see the lid from the door. Twelve pictures and a clean red rectangle. He looked at the rectangle and shut the lid.
He took the left chain down and put in a new eye bolt and a shackle, and he used the WD-40 off the bench.
I made coffee. I got two mugs down off the third shelf. Francis’s brown one, and the white one from the credit union I never use.
The green one stayed where it was.
When he finished he sat down on the swing to try it. He pushed off with his heels, and it went back and forth, and it didn’t make a sound.
I sat down next to him. I held my phone out at arm’s length, and there we both were on the little screen.
He was looking past me, at the garage.
“Look at the phone, honey,” I said, and took it.
If this one stayed with you, call the friend who’s had your key the longest and just say hello.
Stories of old loyalties and painful surprises continue in the mother who put her twins in the basement and the husband whose story about cello lessons didn’t add up. And for another porch-side mystery, read about the envelope her husband handed to her sister.
