I picked up the soft gray paper from beside the cranberry sauce and read the number again there in the VFW hall, with a spoon of mashed potatoes dripping in my other hand, and the veteran in the Korea cap leaned in so close I could smell his shaving soap. Box 537, First Montana Bank, Lewistown. And in the corner, in the square print of Walt, a line that made my knees go soft. For Cora, on Halloween. He had sewn it into the neck of the silliest thing he ever owned, because he knew that sooner or later I would hold that gorilla head again.
“Mom,” Tanner said, “I was taking out the garbage on Sunday, and the head rolled out of the bag. I saw the black thread and I thought, Dad never sewed. That is your stitch. So I cut it open in the garage with my keys.” His voice cracked. “Brynlee does not know. She called him ugly and I stood at that door and said nothing. I said nothing for twenty three days.” I put down the spoon. I wiped my hands on my apron and looked at my boy, thirty eight years old, with the face of his father and the shoulders of a child who has been caught.
We left the casseroles with the ladies of the auxiliary, who waved us off like a send off at the train station, and we drove to the bank in the truck of Tanner with the heater roaring and the snow whirling across Main Street. The manager, Mrs. Lindgren, a calm woman in a gray cardigan, met us at the door though it was a holiday. Walt had left a card with the bank in February. Mrs. Cora Rudd may open box 537 on any day she presents this paper. She had been waiting for nine months for me to walk in.
In the quiet of the vault I opened the little steel door with the key that was folded inside the paper. There was a manila envelope, a bank passbook, and a shoe box tied with kitchen string. I untied the string. Inside were forty one photographs, one for every Halloween of our marriage, each with the year written on the back in pencil. Walt in his barn coat and the gorilla head, growling at a trick or treater. Walt with a pumpkin. Walt with me at thirty, laughing so hard I had my hand over my mouth.
Some men are too shy to say love out loud, so they hide it inside the silliest thing they own and trust the right person to take a needle to it.
The envelope held a letter, two pages, in his slow block capitals. Cora, you married a man who could not sew a button. I wore that ugly head every year for forty one years so you would laugh, and the truth is I was shy, and the head made me brave. The passbook is for the sewing room you always wanted. Thirty eight thousand dollars, from the calves I sold and never told you about. Find a room on Main with north windows. I would have said all this out loud, but I am a coward in a barn coat, so I hid it in a gorilla. Happy Halloween, wife.
I sat down on the little stool in the vault and laughed until I wept. Tanner put his arms around me from behind. For a long time neither of us said anything, and the air in that steel room smelled of old paper and cold iron and the faint sweetness of the man I had loved. When I could finally speak, I said, “He called it ugly because he knew I would defend it.” Tanner nodded into my hair. “Mom,” he said. “Brynlee is waiting in the lobby. She has something to say, and she brought the kids.”
She stood by the bank door in her good coat with her hands twisted together, and in front of her stood the three of them in costume, the dragon and the pumpkin and the astronaut, because the children had refused to take them off since the Saturday before. Brynlee did not speak at first. Then she said, “Cora, I am ashamed. I said those things because the children love your house more than mine, and I could not bear it. I never learned how to share a grandmother. Please forgive me.” The flashlight of Jace came on and lit the ceiling.
I knelt, which my knees did not enjoy, and the dragon and the pumpkin and the astronaut piled onto me all at once. I told Brynlee that I forgave her, and that I would like her to do one thing in return. “Come to the playhouse on the twelfth of December,” I said. “Bring everyone. Sit in the front row.” She nodded, her eyes bright. On the night of the show, all five of them were there, and when Tiny Tim hobbled onto the stage on the cane of Walt, the whole house stood up.
In April I rented a narrow room on Main Street with two tall windows facing north. The sign says Cora and Needle, painted by Tanner in his own hand, a little crooked. The gorilla head of Walt sits in the window on a stand, with a fresh whipstitch at the neck sewn by me, and little children press their noses to the glass every afternoon on the way home from school. I have seven customers a week, and a waiting list for wedding dresses, and a window that fills with light at ten in the morning.
Brynlee comes every Tuesday for a lesson. She is hopeless at hems and a natural at buttonholes, and last month she finished a small blue jacket for Hazel with no help at all. She held it up in the light of the north window and looked at me, not for praise, but to see if I was proud. I was. I told her so. We drank our tea and talked about nothing, and she told me, quite suddenly, that she had never had anyone teach her to sew before. “Now you do,” I said.
On Halloween, Tanner sat on my porch in the barn coat of Walt and the gorilla head, and he growled at every child who came up the steps, and then he handed each of them a full size Snickers. The line stretched down the block. At the end of the night, when the last pirate had gone, he took off the head and sat there in the porch light with tears running down his face. “He would have loved this,” he said. I said that he did. I said he was right there, in the dark, laughing.
