The lady in the ticket booth at St. Agnes had a yellow pencil tucked behind her ear and a heavy plastic mug of lukewarm tea sitting right next to her little stamping machine.
Her name tag said Brenda, though I only noticed that later when my fingers stopped shaking enough to focus on anything besides the blue paper in my hand.
I had pulled my old station wagon up to the gate because the automatic arm had stayed down, refusing to lift for my monthly parking pass even though I had renewed it just three weeks ago at the front desk.
Brenda looked out her little sliding window at me, squinting through her bifocals against the bright Gulf Coast midday glare that always bounced right off the white gravel of the visitors lot.
She tapped her fingernail against her clipboard once, twice, like she was trying to recall something from a grocery list, and then she leaned her chin on her hand.
Is Curtis feeling any better today, honey? she asked, her voice dropping into that familiar sort of church-social softness that people in our town use when they are talking about someone who has taken a bad turn.
I just sat there with my foot resting on the brake pedal, the engine humming that quiet little whistle it had been making since the alternator belt got loose back in November.
I don’t know what you mean, I said, leaning out my window so Brenda could hear me over the traffic rumbling down the bypass behind the maple trees.
Curtis hasn’t been sick. He’s just down at the Methodist hall helping Brother Ray finish up those old oak pews before Easter Sunday.
Brenda stopped tapping her pencil.
She turned her clipboard around, running her thumb down a column of handwritten names and license plate numbers written in neat, purple ink.
Well, he’s been coming every Friday for seven months now, she said, not unkindly, just stating it like it was the weather or the price of gasoline down at the Chevron. Always uses bay three. Always right around eight in the morning.
I remember thinking the engine noise was terribly loud right then, even though it was just the normal idle of a ten-year-old car.
I told Brenda she must have him mixed up with somebody else because Curtis had a very specific way of spending his Fridays, always wearing his grey work flannels and taking his black metal lunch box with the dent in the corner.
She didn’t argue with me.
She just reached out, pressed the red button under her counter that lifted the yellow gate, and told me to have a blessed afternoon.
I drove straight home, but I didn’t park in the driveway because the grass needed edging and I didn’t want to look at the garden shears sitting by the porch steps.
Instead, I pulled around to the back alley and sat there in the shade of the old pecan tree for nearly twenty minutes, watching the blue jays fight over a fallen hull on the neighbor’s roof.
Curtis had been coming home every single one of those Fridays right around four in the afternoon.
He always smelled like cedar dust and cheap machine oil, washing his hands at the kitchen sink with that orange pumice soap that got the deep grime out from under his fingernails.
He would kiss the top of my head while I was browning beef for pot roast or slicing up tomatoes from the garden, asking me how my morning at the library guild went.
He was so gentle.
He was always the kind of man who would check the oil in my car before I drove out to my mother’s place, the kind of man who kept a spare house key hidden inside a hollowed-out sprinkler head by the hydrangeas just in case I ever locked myself out.
I went inside the house through the side door, moving very quietly because the floorboards in the hallway always creaked if you stepped too near the linen closet.
I didn’t turn on the overhead lights.
I went straight to the hall closet where Curtis kept his winter gear and his old tackle boxes behind the vacuum cleaner and the extra rolls of paper towels.
I don’t even know why I did it, honestly.
I think part of me was just looking for his spare set of truck keys to prove to myself that Brenda had been talking about some other Curtis, some stranger with a similar truck and a similar grey flannel shirt.
I reached past his rubber duck boots and shoved aside an old canvas duffel bag we used to take camping back when our knees still worked right.
Way down in the dark corner, behind the spare tire we had taken off his old Ford pickup two summers ago, there was a heavy manila envelope tucked flat against the baseboard.
It didn’t look like much.
It was bowed in the middle like someone had shoved a thick stack of papers inside in a hurry, and the corner of it was stained with a dark smudge that looked suspiciously like dried grease.
I pulled it out into the pale light coming through the high transom window over the door.
My fingers felt clumsy, thick and cold, like they belonged to someone else standing across the room watching me do it.
Inside the envelope was a small, stiff card with the St. Agnes logo printed in dark blue ink across the top margin.
Oncology Department.
That was the first place my eyes landed, right there in the middle, printed in bold letters that seemed to jump off the paper.
Below that were seven handwritten dates, each one corresponding to a Friday morning over the last seven months, starting back when the azaleas were just beginning to bud in the front yard.
Beside each date was a time written in small, careful numbers.
8:15 AM.
8:20 AM.
8:30 AM.
I sat down right there on the rug by the vacuum cleaner, holding that little blue card in both hands, trying to make the words stay still on the page.
Underneath the card was a cashier’s check drawn on the First National Bank downtown, made out to my name in an amount that made my breath catch in my throat.
Nineteen thousand eight hundred dollars.
Not a penny more, not a penny less, right down to the crisp stamp from the teller’s window dated just two days ago.
And tucked behind the check was a folded piece of lined yellow notebook paper with Curtis’s handwriting on it.
His handwriting was always a little crooked, leaning hard to the right like he was trying to hurry and finish whatever he was writing so he could get back outside to his garden or his tools.
I unfolded it slowly, smoothing the crease against my knee.
Dear Martha, it began.
If you’re reading this, Brenda must have finally told you, or maybe you went looking in the closet like I always knew you would when you got suspicious.
I read those lines three times before my eyes could move down to the next sentence.
He had known.
He had known I would go looking, and he had left it there for me to find when the time came that he couldn’t keep the miles between us anymore.
The rest of the letter wasn’t very long.
He talked about how the pain in his throat started right around the time we went down to Mobile for our anniversary dinner, how he didn’t want to tell me because he knew I would spend every waking second worrying myself sick the way I did when my sister had her troubles.
He said he wanted one more year of normal mornings.
He wanted to wake up, drink his black coffee at the kitchen table while the radio played the morning farm report, and kiss my forehead without me looking at him with that hospital look in my eyes.
The sawdust, he wrote, was just a habit he kept up so I wouldn’t ask why he needed to shower twice a day.
He went down to the woodshop behind the church just to sit by the old lathe and breathe in the cedar shavings because it smelled like the life we had built together before any of this started.
I sat on that hallway floor for a very long time, listening to the refrigerator hum in the kitchen and the distant sound of a lawnmower two streets over.
The house felt enormous.
It felt empty in a way it never had during all our thirty-eight years of marriage, even when the kids were grown and gone off to college in Tennessee.
I kept looking at the check, then back at the little blue card with the oncology stamps, and then down to the very last line of his letter where the ink smeared slightly from where his thumb had pressed against the paper.
The words didn’t make sense to me at first.
They just sat there on the yellow page, neat and straight, written by a man who had spent his whole life fixing things for other people behind their backs without ever asking for a thank-you.
The last line said, If the surgery doesn’t work, promise you’ll finish the porch swing for me.
