Since my husband passed away in February, Sundays have been the hardest. The house is entirely too quiet. But in April, a brown paper grocery bag began appearing on my porch every Sunday morning before dawn. It always contained a loaf of bread, fresh fruit, and a tin of the expensive Earl Grey tea my husband used to love.
I assumed it was the bereavement committee from my church. I sent a thank-you note to the pastor, but he told me he had no idea what I was talking about.
I had to know who was doing it.
Last Saturday night, I left the porch light off and sat in the dark living room, watching the front window. At 5:15 AM, a shadow moved across the lawn.
I quietly unlatched the door and swung it open. “Thank you,” I started to say.
The figure froze. It was Martin Harris.
Martin lives three houses down. We have not spoken a single word to each other in twenty-two years. Not since the argument over the property line that ended with my husband threatening to call the police, and Martin shouting things that could never be unsaid.
He stood on my porch, clutching the brown paper bag. He looked old, his shoulders stooped, his face deeply lined. He didn’t run. He didn’t look away.
“Martin?” I whispered, shocked. “Why are you doing this?”
He slowly lowered the bag to the porch floor. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, tarnished silver watch. My husband’s watch, the one he lost on a hunting trip two decades ago.
“Because,” Martin said, his voice breaking, “I owe him my life.”
He Held It Out Like It Might Bite Me
I didn’t take it. Not at first.
I worked thirty-one years as the secretary at Lincoln Elementary, and the thing you learn in that job is that when someone shows up at the wrong hour holding something, you let them talk before you touch it. Lost lunch money. A note from a mother. Once a dead bird in a shoebox.
So I stood there in my robe with my arms crossed, and Martin stood there with the watch dangling from two fingers, and the Kowalskis’ wind chime across the street kept going like it does every morning, that stupid tuneless clank.
“Turn it over,” he said.
I knew what was on the back. I’d paid eleven dollars to have it engraved at the jeweler in the Westfield mall in 1991, for our tenth anniversary. But I took it from him and turned it over anyway, because my hands wanted something to do.
D. Every hour. C.
The silver had gone almost black in the letters. Somebody had been rubbing that spot with a thumb for a long time.
“He told me he lost it in the woods,” I said. “Up at his cousin’s place in Tioga County. He was sick about it.”
“He didn’t lose it.”
“Then you took it.”
Martin shook his head. He put one hand on the porch rail like he needed it.
“Carol, I wasn’t hunting that weekend. I didn’t even bring a tag.” He looked at the bag of groceries by his feet instead of at me. “I went up there to die.”
Dale Never Said a Word About Seeing Anyone Up There
I let him in. I still don’t know exactly why.
He wiped his feet on the mat for a long time. Too long. Then he sat at my kitchen table in Dale’s chair, which I didn’t say anything about, and I put the kettle on because that’s what my hands do when they don’t know what else to do.
He told it in pieces. I’ll put it together the way I’ve put it together since.
November of 2002. Seven months after the fight over the fence. Martin’s wife, Joanne, had left that summer and taken their daughter to her sister’s in Harrisburg. He’d been let go from the Mack plant in September. He’d stopped answering the phone. I remember his lawn going to seed that fall and feeling, God forgive me, pleased about it.
He drove up to state forest land that bordered the Pruitt cousins’ hunting property. He’d been up there before, years earlier. He knew nobody would find him for a while.
“I sat down against a big oak,” he said. “I had the rifle across my legs. It was cold enough I couldn’t feel my feet. I’d been sitting maybe two hours, working up to it, and I heard somebody coming through the leaves. Loud. Like a bear.”
“Dale walked like that,” I said.
“He walked like that.” Martin almost smiled. “He came around a deadfall and saw me, and he saw the gun, and he saw how I was holding it. And I swear to you, Carol, the first thing out of his mouth was, Well, shit.”
That was Dale. That was exactly, completely Dale.
“I told him to get away from me. I said some things. I pointed it at him for a second. I don’t know if he told you that.”
“He didn’t tell me any of this.”
“No. He promised me he wouldn’t.”
The kettle started to tick, the way it does right before it goes.
Dale didn’t leave. He sat down on a log about ten feet away, Martin said, and he didn’t argue and he didn’t pray at him. He talked about the Phillies. He talked about the price of propane. He asked if Martin had eaten, and when Martin said no, Dale pulled half a ham sandwich out of his coat, wrapped in wax paper, which I would have packed for him that morning.
“I ate your sandwich,” Martin said. “Sitting there with the rifle. I ate it.”
After a while, Dale held out his hand and asked for the shells. Just the shells. Martin could keep the gun.
It took close to five hours. It was dark by the time Martin worked them out of the magazine and dropped them one at a time into Dale’s palm. Six of them. Martin remembered six.
Then Dale drove him to the hospital in Wellsboro and sat in the emergency waiting room until two in the morning. He’d called me from a pay phone and said the truck had trouble and he was staying over at his cousin Bill’s. I believed him. Why wouldn’t I.
“Before he left,” Martin said, “he took that watch off his wrist and buckled it onto mine. My hands were shaking too bad to do it. He said, You look at this every hour. Every hour you look at it and you say, I made it one more. And when you don’t need it anymore, you give it back.”
The kettle screamed. I let it.
The Words I Had Kept for Twenty-Two Years
I need to tell you what Martin shouted at us over that fence, because I carried it like a stone in my shoe for two decades and I want you to understand what it was I’d been carrying.
The fight was about four feet of ground along the side of our house. Martin had a survey done in the spring of 2002 because he wanted to put in a shed, and the survey said our hydrangeas were on his side. Dale said the survey was garbage. Martin said Dale could take it up with the county. Dale said he’d take it up with Martin’s face. It went on like that for two weeks.
Then one Saturday in April, Martin started pulling the hydrangeas out with a mattock. My hydrangeas, that I’d planted the summer after we lost our son.
Thomas was born in 1987 and he lived nine days. Everybody on the street knew. Joanne Harris brought us a lasagna that week, I remember, with a note taped to the foil.
Dale went out the door like he’d been fired from a gun. I came out behind him. They were chest to chest at the fence line and Dale was saying he’d call the police, he’d have Martin arrested, and Martin threw the mattock down and pointed past Dale. At me.
“Maybe God knew,” he screamed. “Maybe God took that boy because he knew what kind of father you’d be.”
That’s the sentence.
Dale didn’t hit him. I’ve always wondered why. He just turned around and walked me back into the house with his hand flat on my back, and he never said Martin’s name again unless he had to. Neither did I.
I pulled out the rest of the hydrangeas myself that June. I put in hostas. I hate hostas.
So that’s what I was looking at across my kitchen table. The man who said that. Sitting in my husband’s chair, his hands around a mug I’d just filled, crying without making any noise, the way old men do.
“I’m not asking you to forgive that,” he said. “I want you to know I know what I said.”
I didn’t answer him. I got up and took the milk out of the fridge, and a coupon for Tide pods fell off the door, and I stood there and looked at it on the linoleum for a while instead of looking at him.
Dale Always Went Out for the Paper
Here’s the part I wasn’t ready for.
I asked him why. If Dale saved his life in 2002, why did the two of them act like enemies for the next twenty-two years? Why did Dale cross the street rather than walk past Martin’s mailbox? Why did Martin turn his back when we pulled into the driveway?
Martin wiped his face with the heel of his hand.
“Because I asked him to,” he said. “I couldn’t stand anybody knowing. Not you, not the street, not Joanne. If we’d started waving at each other people would’ve asked. You would’ve asked.”
I would have. That’s true.
“So he kept it up,” Martin said. “Out here. And Sundays, we’d go to the Golden Coach.”
The Golden Coach is a diner out on Route 22. It’s been there since the sixties. The booths are held together with duct tape.
“Every Sunday?”
“Five-thirty. He’d pick me up at the corner of Chestnut so nobody’d see his truck in my driveway.”
Every Sunday morning of my married life after 2002, my husband got up before five and went out “for the paper.” He’d come back around seven with the Morning Call under his arm and a coffee for me and a little powdered sugar on his sweater, and I would brush it off and say, Donuts again, Dale, your cholesterol, and he would say, One donut. A man’s allowed one donut.
Twenty-two years. Over a thousand Sundays.
“He drank the Earl Grey,” Martin said. “The Golden Coach doesn’t carry it. He’d bring his own bag in his shirt pocket and make the waitress bring him a cup of hot water, and she’d roll her eyes at him every single week. Darlene. She’s still there.”
“He drank that at home,” I said. “He drank that all the time at home.”
“He said it was the only fancy thing he let himself have.” Martin turned the mug in his hands. “He said you bought it for him at the Wegmans in Allentown because it was the expensive one, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell you he’d have been fine with Lipton.”
I laughed. It came out of me sideways and wrong, half a cough, and Martin looked up at me startled, like I’d dropped something.
“That son of a bitch,” I said. “I paid nine dollars a tin.”
He Said You’d Catch Me by Summer
I asked about the watch last. Why he still had it, if Dale told him to give it back.
Martin didn’t answer right away. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat again, the other side, and pulled out an envelope. Plain white. Bent soft at the corners from being carried.
My name on the front in Dale’s handwriting. Those big square capitals he used on everything, because his cursive was so bad the bank once rejected a check.
“I tried to give it back,” Martin said. “Probably ten times over the years. He wouldn’t take it. He’d say, You still look at it? and I’d say yeah, and he’d say, Then you still need it.”
He set the envelope on the table between us.
“In January he called me from the hospital. St. Luke’s. He told me to come up on a Tuesday afternoon, because he knew you got your hair done Tuesdays and you’d be gone a couple hours.”
I did. I did go get my hair done that Tuesday. I remember feeling guilty about it, sitting under the dryer while he was lying up there with the tubes in him.
“He gave me that,” Martin said, nodding at the envelope. “He said, Sundays are going to be bad for her. You know about Sundays. He said start in April, give you a little while first. He said bring the tea. And he said you’d catch me. Give it till summer, he said, she’ll sit up one night with the lights off and catch you, because she can’t stand not knowing a thing. And when you catch me, I give you the letter and the watch both.”
It was June 9th. He’d missed by a couple weeks.
I opened it at the table with a butter knife because my fingers wouldn’t get under the flap.
CAROL,
IF YOU’RE READING THIS YOU CAUGHT HIM. I TOLD HIM YOU WOULD. DON’T BE MAD AT MARTY. BE MAD AT ME, I’M EASIER TO BE MAD AT NOW.
I’M SORRY ABOUT THE PAPER. THERE WAS ALWAYS A PAPER. I JUST BOUGHT IT AT THE DINER.
HE IS NOT THE SAME MAN WHO SAID THAT TO YOU. I WAS THERE WHEN THAT MAN DIED AND I WAS THERE FOR THE ONE WHO CAME AFTER. I’VE HAD BREAKFAST WITH HIM FOR 22 YEARS AND I’D LIKE YOU TO HAVE IT WITH HIM SOMETIMES. NOT EVERY WEEK. JUST SOMETIMES.
ONE MORE THING AND THEN I’LL QUIT. THE SURVEY WAS RIGHT. I HAD THE COUNTY DO ANOTHER ONE IN 2003 AND THE LINE IS SIX FEET INTO WHAT WE CALLED OUR YARD, NOT FOUR. IT’S IN THE BLUE FOLDER IN THE FILE CABINET UNDER “TAXES.” I WAS TOO PROUD TO TELL YOU. LET HIM HAVE HIS SHED IF HE STILL WANTS ONE.
HE TAKES THE TEA TOO STRONG. LEAVE THE BAG IN.
I LOVE YOU. EVERY HOUR.
D.
I read it twice. Then I folded it back along the creases he’d made and put it in the pocket of my robe and held my hand over the pocket like it might get up and leave.
Martin was looking at the hostas through the window over the sink. The sun was just coming up on them.
“I don’t want a shed,” he said. “I’m seventy-four. What am I going to put in a shed.”
“You’re getting your six feet.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Too bad. It’s in the blue folder.”
Every Hour
He finished his tea. He’d left the bag in. It was the color of a creek bottom.
When he stood up to go he put both hands on the table first and pushed, and his knee cracked loud enough that we both heard it, and neither of us said anything. At the door he stopped and patted his coat pockets, both sides, like a man checking for his keys. I think he was checking for the watch. Twenty-two years of feeling it there.
It was on my kitchen table, next to the sugar bowl. It had stopped at some point, God knows when. The hands said 3:50.
I picked it up and wound it. The crown was stiff and I had to use my thumbnail. It started up, that thin little tick, and I set it to 6:41 by the clock on the stove, and I put it on my own wrist. Dale had big wrists. The band slid right down over my hand to my knuckles and I had to hold my fingers up to keep it from falling off.
Martin watched me do it from the doorway.
“Next Sunday,” I said. “Five-thirty. And you knock this time. I’m not sitting up in the dark again, my back can’t take it.”
He nodded. He went down the porch steps one at a time with his hand on the rail.
I stood there holding my arm up in the air like a fool, the watch ticking against my knuckle, until he got all the way down the sidewalk past the Kowalskis’ and turned in at his own walk.
—
If someone you love is the quiet one on Sundays, maybe knock on their door this week.
Quiet gestures can carry a whole story, as in the neighbor who left a young mother her house and the Navy buddy who arrived with a sealed envelope. And for another story of grief, memory, and an unexpected act after a funeral, read the neighbor who dug up her mother’s roses.
