A letter from Papaw — Couldn't sleep. Came out to the shed before light.

I was looking for the long screwdriver, the one with the yellow handle. Wasn't on the pegboard where its outline says it ought to be. I expect Earl. I always expect Earl.

Ended up moving Wendell's tackle box to get behind it. Forty-eight years it's sat in that corner. The latch is rusted near shut and I had to work it with my thumb. Inside, the lures are still wrapped in the wax paper he wrapped them in, and underneath the top tray, folded twice, a piece of mill stationery with my handwriting on it.

W — $14. — paid back. My hand, younger. He must've put it in there after I gave him the dollars back, the way a man files a thing he's done with.

He'd borrowed it the winter of '77 to fix the heater in his car. Fourteen dollars. I remember writing it down at the kitchen table because Ruth said write it down or you'll forget, and I remember her hand resting on mine after I did, the way she'd put her hand on mine over a thing that didn't need saying. He paid me back in March. He bought me a cup of coffee at the diner and slid the bills across the table under his palm and we never spoke of it again, and eight months later he was gone.

The fight we almost had over that fourteen dollars was the worst fight we never had. He took two weeks to bring it up. I took a week after that to act like I didn't care. Ruth knew. She didn't say so. She just kept setting the table.

I sat down on the workbench with that piece of paper a long time. The screen door spring let go behind me — it's been loose since before Ruth got sick and I still haven't fixed it — and the rain started up. Sounded like a freight train coming through the pines. Whole sky cracked open at once. I haven't heard a storm like it in years.

I keep my time card from the mill in the same drawer as that note now. Wendell's tackle is back in its corner. I haven't moved it. I haven't moved anything.

Going to wait for the storm to ease and put the long screwdriver back on the pegboard where it belongs. It was on the bench the whole time.

Love,