The Drawer He Never Let Me Open (Continued)

The drawer slid open, and for a moment I just stared, because it was not tax papers at all.

It was letters. Dozens of them, maybe more, each one folded and dated in Walter’s careful hand. The oldest was from 1986, the year we married. The newest was dated just three weeks before he died. Every single one began the same way: ‘My Ruth.’

He had been writing me a letter every year on our anniversary — thirty-nine of them — and never once given me a single one. In them he wrote the things he could never quite say out loud. How proud he was of me. How he still saw the girl from the church picnic every time I laughed. How sorry he was for the year we almost didn’t make it, and how it turned out to be the year he loved me the hardest.

Underneath the letters was a bank envelope. Inside was a savings book I never knew existed, opened the same year as the first letter, with a little added to it every month for thirty-nine years. At the bottom of the envelope was a brochure, soft and worn from handling, for a small cottage on the Oregon coast — the trip I’d talked about taking on our very first date and never stopped mentioning since.

There was a note clipped to the brochure. ‘For when I finally slow down enough to take you. I’m sorry it took me so long, Ruth. Go anyway. Sit by the water for both of us.’

I have read all thirty-nine letters now, one a night, to make them last. And this summer I am going to Oregon. I’ll sit by the water, and I’ll read him the last one out loud, because after thirty-nine years my Walter finally ran out of ways to keep a secret — and the secret was that he loved me even more than he ever let me see.