The envelope had been in the back of Raymond Reed's sock drawer for thirty-one years, and Vivian had known about it for thirty of them.
It was a plain white business envelope, the kind you could buy in boxes of five hundred at an office supply store, gone soft and yellow at the edges from being handled. On the front, in Raymond's blocky engineer's printing, it said FOR V'S DIAMONDS. Underneath, in a different pen, added some years later, it said DO NOT TOUCH, VIVIAN, I MEAN IT. And underneath that, in a third pen, shakier, from the last spring of his life, it said ALMOST.
She found it again in March, a year and four months after the funeral, when she finally made herself go through his dresser. She had done the closet in the first summer. She had done his tools in the garage that fall, giving most of them to their son-in-law, who did not know what half of them were for but promised to learn. The dresser she had saved, the way you save the last bite of something, and then one Saturday morning in March she opened the top drawer and saw the envelope sitting there on top of his black dress socks, exactly where it had always been, and she sat down on the edge of their bed and held it in her lap for a long time before she opened it.
Inside was eleven thousand four hundred dollars, in bills of every denomination, some of them so old the portraits were the small ones. There was also a folded piece of lined paper.
V, the note said. I know you know about this. You've known since 1994, you're terrible at pretending. I said I'd buy you a real diamond necklace someday, the first year we were married, when I gave you that rhinestone one from Walgreens and you wore it to church anyway. Well, someday kept getting pushed back. Tuition. The roof. Denise's wedding. My knee. But I kept putting a little in. This is what's here. If I don't get to take you myself, go downtown and pick something out, and don't you dare buy anything sensible with it. Not the furnace. Not the grandbabies' college. Diamonds. You deserve to walk into one of those fancy places and have somebody hand you something beautiful. Love you past the moon. R.
Vivian Reed had been a high school principal for nineteen years and a teacher for fourteen before that. She had broken up fights between boys twice her size and talked a seventeen-year-old girl down off the roof of the gymnasium and sat across from grieving parents more times than she could count. She did not, as a rule, cry in front of anyone. She cried that morning on the edge of the bed with her husband's note in one hand and his envelope in the other until the sun had moved all the way across the carpet, and then she washed her face and called her daughter.
"He wants you to buy diamonds," Denise said, laughing and crying at the same time on the other end of the phone. "Mama. You have to."