…because what the beam of my flashlight lit up, in that narrow hidden space behind the sink cabinet, was a coffee can. Not one can. A row of them, six in all, lined up on a shelf of rough pine like soldiers, each wrapped in a plastic bread bag and sealed with electrical tape. Beside them stood a tin lunchbox with a picture of a cartoon rabbit on the lid, and a thin brown envelope propped against the wall with a single word on the front in careful blue ink: DOLORES.
The owner of the house was a small, straight backed woman of eighty one named Dolores Reyes, who had hired me that morning to put in a garbage disposal. When I backed out of the cabinet, she looked down. “Mr. Pruitt,” she said, “is there a leak?” I sat up slowly. I told her, as gently as I knew how, that there was no leak, that the cabinet had a false back, and that her husband must have built it. I had never seen her face change so fast. It went from puzzled to stricken to something like wonder. “Hector,” she whispered. “Oh, you old fox.”
She sat down at the kitchen table, and I set the envelope in front of her. Her fingers trembled so badly that I offered to open it, and she shook her head. She slid out a single sheet of paper, ruled yellow, in the same blue ink. She read it silently first, and then she read it aloud, in a voice that wavered like a candle flame. Dolores, my love. If you are reading this, it means you finally called a plumber. I told you that sink was a disaster. In the cans are the savings bonds I bought one at a time since 1985. I kept them here because your nephew Ricky has the nose of a bloodhound for money, and I did not want you to be talked out of them.
A sink cabinet four inches too shallow hid a row of coffee cans, a porch fund, and the final act of love of one husband.
She put the page down and laughed, a short startled laugh, with tears sliding down both cheeks. “That is Hector,” she said. “He was a machinist at the glass plant for thirty four years, and he never trusted a bank or a relative.” I got the cans out one at a time, and she opened each with a butter knife. Inside were stacks of paper savings bonds in cream and green and pale blue, bundled with rubber bands gone brittle. There were hundreds of them. She counted slowly, moving her lips. At the bottom of the last can lay a smaller envelope containing the deed to a quarter acre of land beside the Ohio River, and a handwritten note: For the porch you always wanted.
I did the arithmetic quietly on the back of my work order, because I could not help myself. The bonds, with interest, came to over eighty seven thousand dollars. Dolores had lived for years on a small widow pension, clipping coupons, turning off the lights at dusk to save the electric. She looked at the figure, and then at me, and she asked a question I did not expect. “Mr. Pruitt, do you think my nephew will find out?” I did not answer right away.
“Mrs. Reyes, I think you should keep this between you and a bank,” I said. “Not a relative. Not me. A real bank, with a manager, and a lawyer who can set it up so nobody can touch it but you.” She nodded, her lips pressed together. “Will you drive me?” she asked. “I do not trust myself to go alone. I have never been so frightened in my life.” I said I would be honored. We wrapped the cans in a bath towel and put them in the back of my van, and I held the door while she climbed in, small and upright, with the lunchbox on her lap, and we drove the six miles to town like two bank robbers.
The manager was a patient young man named Mr. Okoye, who sat with us for two hours in a glass office and helped her redeem every bond. A lawyer arrived at three. By closing time, Dolores had a trust account, a will, and a legal document naming her niece in Charleston as her power of attorney, a girl who had not once asked her for money. When it was over, she stood in the lobby with her handbag against her chest and looked at the marble floor. “Hector would have been so pleased,” she said. “He used to say that a woman who knows where her money is, is a woman who cannot be frightened.”
I returned to her house the next morning to finish the disposal. I installed it, ran the water, and flipped the switch. Then she stood in the middle of her kitchen, looking at the cabinet with its false back open, and she asked me something else. “Mr. Pruitt, would you build me a porch?” I laughed, and said that I was a plumber. She smiled. “You are also an honest man, and my husband left me land.” I told her I knew a carpenter who owed me a favor. By the first week in June, we were setting posts for a wide wooden porch overlooking the river.
She sat on it every evening, in a rocking chair that her niece had bought at an estate sale, with a glass of iced tea on the railing and the lunchbox in her lap. The lunchbox, it turned out, held every love letter Hector had ever written her, in rubber banded bundles by year. She read one a night. She told me that she had thought she knew all the words he had left, and each evening she discovered a few more. I would stop by on my way home from jobs and wave from the truck, and she would lift her glass, and the sun would go down red over the water.
When she passed, two summers later, she left the house and the porch to the niece. In the kitchen, taped to the inside of the sink cabinet where the false back had been, she left a note for me in her round handwriting. Mr. Pruitt, it said. Thank you for always checking behind things. The best things in a house are rarely where they are supposed to be. I keep it on the dashboard of my van. When young plumbers ask me what the secret of the trade is, I show them the note, and I tell them: look at the back of the cabinet. It may be a little shallow. And a little shallow may be the whole story.
