She arrived Saturday carrying nothing but her purse, and she stayed on the porch exactly as she had promised. Before I could ask anything, Karen said, “Your husband knows why I’ve never walked through that door, and he knows why I can’t do it now.” I looked at her and suddenly understood why my husband had disappeared into the garage for forty minutes when I mentioned it. Karen told me that thirty-one years ago, before we had children, my husband had asked her to promise something. She said he had told her that if anything ever happened to him, she was never to come inside our home alone. I laughed nervously and asked why anyone would make such a strange promise, and she looked at me and said, “Because he knew what you’d find if I ever did.”
She finally told me that the first year of our marriage, my husband had been keeping a box in Karen’s apartment. Inside were letters he had written to me but never sent, photographs from before we married, and something belonging to my father that I had thought was lost. Karen had agreed to keep it because my husband was afraid I would find it before he was ready to explain. I asked what was in the box that could possibly matter thirty-one years later. She said the last thing inside was a letter my father had written shortly before he died, and my husband had never been able to give it to me. Karen had kept the box all these years because my husband made her promise that if he died first, she would give everything to me herself. Then she looked toward the front door and whispered, “He wasn’t afraid of me coming inside. He was afraid you’d finally learn why he asked me to keep it.”
I asked her to give me the letter, but she shook her head and said it wasn’t hers to hand over on the porch. She told me my husband had moved the box years ago, but he had never told her where. Then she said something that made my stomach drop: “Your husband wasn’t protecting himself from you. He was protecting you from what your father asked him to do.” I went inside and found my husband sitting at the kitchen table with an old wooden box in front of him. He looked at me once and said, “I thought I had another year.” I sat across from him and asked what was in it, and he finally pushed the box toward me. On top was a letter in my father’s handwriting, dated three days before he died—and underneath it was a photograph of my husband and Karen that I had never seen before.
