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I hated that she was right. I wanted to kick myself for having moved away once more, searching for my own life a few short years after the day she showed me the puzzle box. But try as I might, I never did get the rest of the story out of her. Just like everyone else, I had abandoned her to the lost memories that I assumed had died with her. She passed at the age of 95 years young, and though I had known I missed her, I didn’t realize how much until she was permanently gone from my life. I suppose I had always figured that I’d get back to Arkansas to visit her before she passed. I intended to see her every year that passed and thought many times of spending Christmas with her the way we once did. Dancing at the Red Barn would’ve been a special treat. My heart broke the day I got the call, and I knew I would never heal from the heartache - just like she never recovered from losing Arthur.
I knew Grandma had been sick for a while, but I didn’t realize how bad it had been. I guess she had known that it wouldn’t be long before her time would come, but the last thing I ever expected was to get mail from her after her passing. According to the postmark, it was mailed out the same day her funeral happened. She was still reaching out from the grave, refusing to let me go down like the Titanic. She wasn’t even there to stop me, and yet she reached out her strong hand and lifted me from the ground.
I was terrified to even open the box for a long time. Instead, I sat tracing her shaky handwriting with my index finger for over an hour. I couldn’t believe she was gone, just like that. In the blink of an eye, I knew there would never be another holiday with Grandma. There would never be another hug that only she could manage. She’d never tower over me again, laughing boisterously about some old photo showing something crazy she had done in her life. Briefly, I wondered what would happen with the box high on the closet shelf filled with all the amazing photographs from her youth. I didn’t have a good relationship with anyone else in my family. If I were to ask they would instantly accuse me of only wanting her ‘things’, and never having truly loved her at all. They would never know the truth because I resolved myself to never ask.
I pondered about never opening the box in my lap and just holding onto it forever. If I opened the box, it would be my final goodbye to the woman who had been my best friend for all of my life, as far back as I could remember. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her yet. I needed to hold on just a little longer, even if just to pretend that the greatest woman I ever knew was still somehow just a phone call away. My heart was breaking the longer I sat there in silence.
Two months passed before I could bring myself to dig the box out of my bedroom closet. It had been painful to see it sitting on the table, a constant reminder that she was gone and that box was all I had remaining of her. She was the only family I was willing to claim to even have for so long. Her entire existence was reduced to that one box, and I was terrified of even opening it.
“Just open the damn box,” I could almost hear her saying to me. “Life is for living, Manda. Don’t keep living in fear. That’s not living at all.”
She would have been disappointed in me for having put it off for so long, especially considering why I had put it off at all. I pulled the scissors out of the utility drawer and went to cut the tape but paused for a moment. It looked like a note had been folded up and taped to the box over the seam. Carefully, I cut around the note and separated it from the box, a square of tape still taking up space on the exposed side.
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“Dear Manda,
“I know this might come as a shock to you, but I’m gone. Maybe it won’t be quite such a shock. Maybe, you already know and you decided you didn’t want to deal with it yet, so you hid the box somewhere, like a coat closet, and waited to open it for a long time because you were afraid. I know my granddaughter very well. Anyway, I have a few things in here that I wanted you to have. I couldn’t trust anyone else in the family to appreciate them the way you would. And they really don’t know what those things mean anyway, so I wanted to leave you with something special. I hope you don’t mind. Do something amazing with this.
“I love you with all my heart, Kiddo.
“Grandma Ruth.”
––––––––
I wiped away a couple of tears and chuckled a bit. She really did know me entirely too well. Flush with anger at myself for having left her four years ago, I let my hand holding her letter fall to my lap as I held my left palm over my burning eyes. She had known I would hide the box in a closet because I didn’t want to deal with her passing. But she also knew that I’d move on with my life, leaving her behind. I rebuked her, telling her I’d never do such a thing, and then did exactly what I denied I would ever do, not long afterward. I wanted to scream into the arm of the couch, but I held back for fear of scaring the kitten sleeping only a few feet away from me.
I put the letter down on the couch between myself and the sleeping kitten. Then I picked up the scissors to cut open the box, inspecting it first to be sure there were no more external surprises I might damage. The tape cut open easily enough, and the box’s top flaps began to bow outward, urging me onward to inspect the contents.
The first thing I found was a kitchen apron she had made many years ago out of an old table cloth. Having lived through during the Great Depression, she knew quite well how to reuse everything she had. When the tablecloth got a stain or a tear, it would be repurposed into napkins, an apron, maybe a handkerchief or two, and sometimes even a pillowcase. This particular apron had been made from a tablecloth I’d stained as a little girl by spilling grape juice all over it and not telling anyone right away. Being the loving soul that she was, my grandmother used the stained part of the cloth to form the pockets. She’d done it specifically to show me that even once something was ‘ruined’ by conventional standards, it didn’t mean that was the end of the road by any means. When I was little, I didn’t recognize it as a metaphor for her life.
Next came an old shoebox with hundreds of old photos all tucked away, delicately held in place with tissue paper, some of Grandpa’s old kerchiefs, a lace doily, and a few scraps of a crumpled paper bag she’d doodled on.
I traced the marks with my index finger just as before, fighting the familiar burn in my eyes. Slowly, I lifted out the shoebox of photos to reveal the last item at the bottom of the box.
In all its majestic, antique glory, there sat the handmade puzzle box Arthur had given to my grandmother on their first date. I remembered the photos she was okay with showing me that had been tucked away inside. Still, I wondered if the other pieces of her past had been placed back inside or if she had gotten rid of them forever. I pondered a moment about what might have been inside that box the day he gave it to her. The box itself was a beautiful gift, but what could have been contained before she went through it and maybe got rid of a few things? With her now gone, I realized I might never know.
My curiosity couldn’t hold me at bay for long. I felt the overwhelming need to know what was in the puzzle box. I wanted to go through every photo in the shoebox with a fine-tooth comb. I wanted to absorb every single detail I could. Slowly, I realized that with all of the beautiful memories she’d carefully packed away in that box, I’d never truly be without her again. Maybe I couldn’t ever hug her again, but I still had her with me.
I pressed on the familiar old wood grain knot and slid the box open carefully. It was significantly more full than it had been only a few years before, so she had added to it quite a bit. I surmised that there was more in it that she wanted me to know was from her secret life. The box separated completely, and I was left staring down into a pile of memories that belonged to the person I loved most in the world.
The hilarious photo of her wrestling a bull snake was on the top, no doubt her way of wanting to make me chuckle a bit. Beneath that was the photo of her and Arthur on the park bench. Then came the ice skating photo of her in a swimsuit. I laughed again. The next one took my breath away. She had saved a newspaper clipping from many years before. One journalist had written about the little girls who roller-skated down the capitol steps protesting the Tulsa Race Riots. There were no photos to accompany the clipping, but the story was in my hand. She wasn’t even named in the article, but I knew it was about her. There were also three photos I’d not seen before, all three of her with Arthur. In the first one they were a happy couple sitting on the beach somewhere, but my Grandmother was grimacing at the photographer, probably looking into the sun. Arthur wore a pair of round dark eyeglasses on his nose. They had their arms over each other’s shoulders and looked like a happy young couple. There was nothing written on the back of the photo. The next was the two of them standing in front of a large rock, her in a sweater and skirt, him in a sweater with long pants and a collared shirt. He had his arm around her waist, and she was pointing to the bottom of her rib cage in a somewhat awkward manner.
The last one was the most impressive. My grandmother had dark wavy hair, parted on the left and curled all over. She had thin eyebrows, thin eyeliner, dark lipstick, rings on two of her fingers, a tiny watch on her wrist, and only had eyes for the fair Arthur, who was kissing her gently on the cheek. They both looked so beautiful, and it almost seemed risque to see them cuddled on a pillow even though they were fully dressed. It was one of the most beautiful photos I’d ever seen in my life. The sepia tones, the rich contrasts, the pearl teeth of my grandmother's smile combined to make the pair almost angelic.
I looked closer at the rings on her fingers and didn’t recognize either one as the rings she wore when I had known her. Instinctively I knew where to look next. Buried in the bottom of the puzzle box, in a tiny wooden box of its own that I opened with a little effort sat both of the rings. The first one was a small gold ring with a pearl in place of a jewel. I recognized it as the ring that had been on her index finger in the photo. It was delicate and didn’t look expensive, but it was remarkably beautiful and now quite old. The gold band had a twisted swirl pattern to it and the brackets holding the pearl into the ring were in the shape of delicate flower petals. I slid this one onto my index finger, where it hung loosely, so I slid it off once more and placed it carefully back into the box. The other ring was what really robbed the air from my lungs.
It was stunning. The band was a simple gold band, but the diamonds were set in two different tiers. The first layer had tiny diamond chips all the way around and shone like nothing I’d ever seen. The center stone was raised above the others and sat there in majestic glory. It didn’t shine the way modern diamonds do since there weren’t nearly as many facets cut on a diamond around the time the photo was taken, but it was still one of the most beautiful rings I’d ever seen.
There was something engraved inside the ring, and the closer I looked, the more I was able to make out the words.
“That Arthur,” I mumbled to myself. “He really was a romantic.” I smiled, read the words a few more times, and slid the ring onto my middle finger, where it sat so perfectly.
The ring had been her engagement ring. Inside were engraved the words “no more goodbyes, only good nights,” and I instantly understood why she had never shown it to me before, in spite of its undeniable beauty. As much as she loved Arthur, as much as she had wanted to move on with her life, that memory was too painful for her to talk about with anyone. She knew there would be questions, and that I wouldn’t have been satisfied until I knew the truth. Oh, how I longed to hear her voice telling me the stories of her youth once more.
There was still something large left in the bottom of the puzzle box, next to where the ring box had been nestled, but I couldn’t quite make out what it was with all the photos piled on top of it. Gently, as carefully as she had shown them to me, I lifted the photos one by one and placed them on the coffee table in front of me. Nearing the bottom, I could make out the familiar type of her old typewriter on the cover page of her story “Hilltop of Roses” staring back at me. I smiled, wondering if she intended for me to see if the story could be published for her posthumously. It was such a beautiful story. I knew I had to try. Carefully, I lifted it out of the box and held it gently in my hands. I smiled, remembering the story and her reaction to my appreciation of her writing. I held it to my chest in a hug, closing my eyes tightly for a moment. I was overjoyed that she would trust her beautiful story to me.
When I opened my eyes, I realized there was one last thing in the puzzle box. My mouth fell open and I stared with wide eyes. One more stack of pages was neatly typed out and tucked into a clear folder. The pages were fresh and new, still crisp and white, the title on the front page.
“Arthur Ardent”
She had done it. She had written her story.