Warren kept that heavy concrete angel right by the south tomato beds for thirty years. After the funeral, when the house felt too quiet and the grass started getting away from me, I almost called the church rummage sale just to clear the yard out. I couldn’t so much as tip the thing an inch on my own.
My knees have been giving me fits since the winter, and bending down to pull weeds is about all I can manage before my back locks up.
When the young fellow named Cody came over with his red dolly to haul off the extra pots and the old birdbath, I pointed at the angel and told him he could take that too if he had the muscle for it. He was a nice enough boy, nineteen or twenty, with grease permanently scrubbed into the corners of his fingernails and that polite way the local kids have around here. He walked over, grabbed the wings, and tried to hoist it.
The dolly wheels didn’t even roll. He let go and blew out a breath, wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist.
“That thing’s weighted down with lead or something, Miz Clara,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know how Mr. Warren ever got it out here by himself.”
I didn’t think much of it at the time. Warren was strong in his shoulders back when the paper mill was still running three shifts, before the company locked the gates for good and left half of Hattiesburg looking for work that wasn’t there. He hauled heavy machinery parts until his elbows swelled up like biscuits, so hauling a fifty-pound statue from his mother’s yard in the nineties didn’t seem like a stretch.
He was strange about that angel, though. I had almost forgotten how strange he got whenever I mentioned moving it. Back when we were still putting in new landscaping timbers along the back fence, I told him I wanted to slide the angel over six feet so we could plant a row of blue hydrangeas where the sun hit better. Warren had dropped his shovel right there in the dirt. He didn’t yell, because Warren almost never yelled, but his voice went down low and flat.
“Leave my angel where she sits,” he said.
I figured it was just sentiment about his mama, Miss Ruth. She had been a proud, hard woman who kept a immaculate garden and never had a kind word for anybody outside the Methodist church.
When she passed away in ninety-four, Warren went and rented a flatbed trailer just to bring that one statue home. He set it by the tomatoes himself, and it stayed right there through thirty summers of red clay and humidity, until the face wore so smooth you couldn’t tell if the angel was smiling or crying.
Cody didn’t give up easy. He wedged the lip of his dolly under the base and rocked the whole heavy thing back on its edge to slide the tongue underneath. The concrete scraped against the dirt, making a dry, grating sound that set my teeth on edge. Cody crouched down to check the wheels, and then he froze. He didn’t move an inch. He just stared up at the bottom of the statue like he was looking at a copperhead snake coiled up in the grass.
“Ma’am,” he said, and his voice sounded funny. “Come look at this.”
I walked over slow, my funeral slacks rustling against each other, and looked down past his shoulder. The bottom of the angel wasn’t solid concrete at all. It was open, hollowed out like a bell, with just a thin crust around the rim to make it look heavy from the outside. Taped up deep inside that hollow cavity with layer upon layer of gray duct tape was something bulky and rectangular.
“Is that a nest?” I asked.
“No, ma’am,” Cody said, looking up at me with wide eyes. “That’s wrapped up tight. Something’s hidden in there.”
My stomach gave a hard, sour twist. I dropped right down onto the grass, ignoring the dampness soaking through my good black trousers, and craned my neck to peer up into the dark belly of the statue. Warren had stuffed something up there so far that the gray tape was gray-brown with decades of dust and spiderwebs.
Thirty years. Warren told me year after year not to let anybody touch it. Not our grandson when he was twelve and trying to mow around it with the push mower, not the man who came to spray for termites, and certainly not me. I always figured he was just particular about his garden, the way old men get about their tomatoes or their bird feeders.
“Can you get it down, Cody?” I asked. My hands were shaking in my lap, and I tucked them under my arms to hide it.
“I can try,” he muttered.
He reached up inside the cool, damp concrete, his fingers working at the thick crust of old tape where it stuck to the inner wall. It didn’t want to give. The glue had dried out and turned hard over the decades, sealing the bundle to the stone like mortar. He had to yank twice, his shoulder muscles bunching up under his plaid shirt, before something gave way with a muffled tearing sound.
When it dropped, it landed right in my lap with a heavy, solid thud that knocked the wind out of me. It was heavier than any book or bundle of papers had a right to be. Wrapped around the outside with more gray tape was a thick brown envelope with my name written across the front in Warren’s blocky, stubborn print. Just *Clara*.
Cody stood up, dusting off his hands, looking nervous now that he realized he was holding the middle of someone else’s secret. “You want me to help you get this inside the kitchen, Miz Clara?”
“No,” I said, and my voice sounded hollow even to me. “You go on and take the birdbath, Cody. Leave the angel right here.”
He didn’t argue. He loaded the other pieces onto his truck, took his twenty dollars from the coffee can on the porch, and drove off down the gravel drive without looking back twice. The dust settled over the hydrangeas. The cicadas started up again in the old oak tree by the fence line, loud and steady.
I sat there on the grass for a long time with that heavy bundle resting on my knees. The envelope was stuck to the front with yellowed cellophane tape that crackled like dry leaves when I touched it. I didn’t want to open it. Part of me wanted to take the whole thing and shove it right back up inside the angel and pretend Cody never came over at all.
Warren wasn’t a complicated man on the outside. He ate his eggs over easy every morning, wore his Sears work shirts until the cuffs frayed clean off, and clipped coupons out of the Sunday paper until his fingers got too stiff to hold the scissors. We lived on a tight budget after the mill closed, pinching every penny until it squeaked, worrying over electric bills in January and property taxes in November. He always told me we were just one bad month away from losing the truck.
I peeled the envelope off first. The paper inside was old school tablet paper with blue lines, folded once across the middle. I unfolded it carefully, my thumb catching on a rough edge, and started reading the block letters he must have written late at night while I was already asleep upstairs.
*Clara,* it started. *If you’re reading this, my heart finally gave out like I knew it would.*
I had to stop for a second and catch my breath because the wind picked up and ruffled the edges of the paper. My hands wouldn’t steady down.
*Don’t be mad,* the letter went on. *You always said we were broke, and I let you think it because it was easier than explaining. When the mill shut down in eighty-eight, they gave us severance packages if we signed away our right to join the class action. Most boys took the check and spent it on trucks or beer. I took my share and the spare cash from the scrap metal yard over in Richton, and I started converting it.*
Conversion. That was the word he used.
I reached down and began peeling away the layers of gray tape from the heavy rectangular bundle underneath the letter. It took three minutes of scraping with my fingernails before the outer layer gave way and the contents spilled out into my lap.
Bundles of cash. Not hundreds, mostly fifties and twenties, thick and banded with rubber bands that had rotted flat and turned into sticky orange strings. And beneath the cash, several heavy white envelopes from the Hattiesburg Federal Savings and Loan, dated between 1992 and 2004, filled with municipal bonds and cashier’s checks made out directly to bearer.
I sat there in the grass staring at the neat little stacks of money, my heart knocking hard against my ribs like a trapped bird. There were savings bonds in there with our grandson’s name on them, and others in mine, bought one at a time over fifteen years while Warren was driving that delivery route for minimum wage and complaining about the price of gasoline.
*Every time you worried about the mortgage,* the letter said near the bottom, *I had this sitting out in the yard. I couldn’t put it in the bank because the state would have taken half for my back taxes from the old truck repair shop, and I couldn’t tell you because you’d have worried yourself sick keeping a secret from the kids. It’s about fifty-four thousand dollars, Clara. It’s yours. Pay off the house and don’t let Bobby talk you into loaning any of it to his brother.*
I laughed out loud then, a short, sharp sound that startled a blue jay out of the cedar tree. That was Warren all over. Even from the grave, making sure I didn’t give our oldest boy a dime for another one of his half-baked pipe dreams.
The sun started dipping down behind the treeline, throwing long, thin shadows across the tomato beds and the old concrete angel standing crooked in the dirt. My knees ached from sitting on the damp ground, but I didn’t get up right away. I just sat there with the money scattered across my black slacks and Warren’s letter clutched in my fist, looking at the hollow base where he had kept our life safe for thirty years without me ever knowing he was anything other than a tired man with bad knees.
