She smoothed a napkin against her knee.
“Ruth brought her entire gardening club.”
I looked toward Ruth.
“They needed scarves,” she said.
“Eleven of them?”
“It gets cold.”
Stephanie laughed, and then had to wipe her eyes.
She returned the following month with a repaired lining in my old winter coat. I paid her usual price. She accepted without arguing. We both seemed to need that ordinary exchange.
As Christmas approached again, Marcus asked whether he could bring back the suitcase he had left behind.
It had been collected from my porch through David’s office the previous winter. I hadn’t asked what was inside.
“I found something packed underneath my shirts,” he said. “Something Dad gave me.”
I agreed to a Saturday visit.
An hour. Ruth would be there.
He arrived carrying a small wooden box.
My husband had made it from scraps of cedar. I recognized the uneven corner where he had always claimed the wood, rather than his measuring, was at fault.
Inside lay seven little brass stars, each with a hole drilled near its top.
Beneath them was a folded note in my husband’s handwriting.
For the porch. Your mother always says the light stops too soon.
I sat down.
Years before he died, I had complained that our Christmas lights reached the front steps but left the path to the pavement dark. Every December, he had meant to build a few wooden stakes and hang reflectors along it.
I had forgotten.
Or thought I had.
“He gave me these the spring before he died,” Marcus said. “Asked me to finish the stakes when I had time.”
His voice thinned.
“I kept moving the box from one shelf to another.”
I ran my thumb across a star.
There were small scratches around its edges, places my husband had filed away the sharpness.
Under the note was another scrap of paper.
A drawing of seven stakes. Measurements. Then a sentence squeezed along the bottom.
Leave the last one a little crooked. She won’t believe we did it otherwise.
A sound escaped me that was half sob, half laugh.
Ruth put her hand over her mouth.
Marcus looked down at the stars.
“I’m not asking to use this to make things better.”
“I know.”
“If you want someone else to finish them, I understand.”
I held the note against my palm.
For nearly a year, that porch had been the place where I had learned something terrible.
Here was a small, unfinished piece of love that had been waiting longer.
“Bring your tools next Saturday,” I said.
