A letter from Papaw — Late. Two in the morning, maybe later.

Couldn't sleep. Went looking for the flashlight in the kitchen drawer — the deep one nobody opens — and found a grocery list in Ruth's handwriting under a pile of takeout menus and rubber bands and a flashlight battery that hasn't worked since she was alive.

Milk. Bread. Aspirin. Light bulbs, 60 watt. Call Doris.

That was it. Five things on the back of an envelope from the power company. Her hand the way it always was, the e's that looked like little o's, the way she underlined 60 watt like the hardware store man might try to sell her something else.

I sat down at the table with it. Sat a long while.

I'll tell you something. There was a stretch after she passed — second year, maybe — where I thought about selling the house. Earl knew somebody up near Burnsville with a place for rent. I drove up there one Saturday and looked at it. Little house on a road I didn't know. Mailbox with somebody else's name on it. I stood in the kitchen and thought, nobody up here would know to ask about Ruth. Nobody'd look at me with that look. I could just be a man who moved in.

I didn't do it. Came home. Hank was waiting on the porch step where Earl sits, looking at me the way he does when he wants something, and I couldn't picture him in a kitchen that wasn't this one.

Some nights I still think about it. Tonight a little. A town where my name didn't mean a dead wife and a closed mill and a brother in the ground. Where I was just the new fellow on the road.

But here's the thing, and I mean it plain. That grocery list was in a drawer I haven't opened in four years, in a house I've lived in fifty-two, and I'd have never found it in Burnsville. The price of a place where nobody knows your name is they don't know hers either.

I put the list in the drawer with the photographs.

Going to try to sleep. Earl's coming by tomorrow. Still no saw.

Love,