Sam’s toolbox was on the workbench, where I’d put it after the funeral. A big red metal box with SAM written on the lid in silver paint marker. I hadn’t opened it in ten months.
I carried it inside and set it on the kitchen floor in front of the sink.
I opened the lid.
Everything was exactly where he’d left it. Wrenches lined up by size. Screwdrivers in their slots. A roll of plumber’s tape. A tape measure with a broken clip. And in the little tray at the top, a plastic case full of rubber washers, every size, sorted and labeled in his handwriting.
There was also a crumpled receipt from Kroger. Sunflowers, $9.99. Dated March 14.
I sat down on the kitchen floor and held that receipt for a long time.
I called Marta.
“My faucet’s running,” I said. “The cold side. I don’t know how to fix it.”
There was a pause on the line.
“Do you have a washer?” she asked.
I looked down at the little plastic case in Sam’s toolbox. Dozens of them. Sorted by size.
“Yes,” I said. “I have a lot of washers.”
“I’m coming over,” she said.
“Marta, it’s six in the morning. And it’s twenty degrees out. And I live twenty minutes away.”
“Ruth,” she said. “It’s twenty minutes. I’ll be there.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I sat on my kitchen floor with my son’s toolbox and laughed until I cried.
She came in a taxi at six-forty, in her gray coat, carrying a bag of poppy seed cookies.
She didn’t know how to fix a faucet either. Neither of us did. But we found a video on my phone, a young man in a backwards baseball cap explaining it slowly, and we did it together. She held the flashlight. I turned off the water under the sink, which took me three tries because I kept turning the wrong valve. I unscrewed the handle with Sam’s screwdriver. I pulled out the old washer, which was cracked and flattened and black.
Marta held up the little plastic case and squinted at Sam’s labels.
“This one,” she said, and handed me one. “Half-inch. His writing says half-inch.”
I put it in. I screwed the handle back on. I turned the water back on under the sink.
Then I turned the cold faucet on. And off.
Nothing. No drip. No stream. Just silence.
We stood there in my kitchen looking at that faucet like it was a miracle.
“We did it,” Marta said.
“He did it,” I said, looking at the label on the little case. Half-inch. In blue ballpoint pen. “He just did it a little late.”
It’s October again now. A year since I caught a stranger taking flowers from my son’s grave.
Yesterday would have been Sam’s thirty-sixth birthday.
I went to Kroger on Wendell Street and bought two bunches of sunflowers. Six stems each, $10.49 now, wrapped in clear plastic with rubber bands around the bottoms. The girl with the purple braces wasn’t there anymore. The cashier was an older man who didn’t say anything, and that was fine.
I drove out to Oak Hill. I put one bunch in the metal cup beside Sam’s headstone. I trimmed the stems with his shears. Clean cut. At an angle. I told him about the faucet, which hasn’t dripped since January. I told him about the waiting list at the cemetery office, which is up to forty-one families now. I told him his frame in Marta’s back room has twenty-nine sunflowers in it, and that we decided it will never be finished. Not as long as there are Saturdays.
Then I walked out the back gate, past the toolshed and the dumpster, and across Hollis Avenue.
I didn’t go to Marta’s door right away. I stood on the curb for a moment and looked north, up Hollis, toward the curve by the creek.
The county finally put up a guardrail there in August. A long gray steel one, and two yellow signs with a curving arrow. Slow. Sharp curve ahead. The white wooden cross is still on the telephone pole. I touched it on my way past last month, for the first time.
I turned around and went up Marta’s cracked concrete walk. The porch light was on in the daytime, the way it always is.
I didn’t knock. Sam never knocked.
I opened the front door and stepped into the kitchen, where she was sitting at the table with her wooden press and her tweezers and her terrible coffee. She looked up.
I held out the sunflowers in their crinkly grocery-store plastic.
“For the prettiest girl on the block,” I said.
Marta looked at the flowers for a long time. Her eyes filled. Then she smiled, and stood up, and took them from me with both hands, very gently.
Like they were still alive.
THE END..!
