The remains of it were still clinging to the sides, mostly degraded into black strips. It wasn't an old pipe. It wasn't construction debris. It was put there on purpose. I sat back on my heels and looked at it.
I didn't reach for it. Something told me to stop and think for a second about what I was doing. That's when I heard the screen door. Footsteps on the deck. Footsteps crossing the grass.
I didn't stand up. I was still kneeling at the edge of the hole. And when Clare Bennett stopped 2 feet behind me and looked down over my shoulder at what I'd found, I heard her breathing change. She didn't gasp. She didn't make a scene.
She just went still in a way that I felt rather than saw. And then she said very quietly, "Please stop." I turned and looked at her. Her face wasn't angry. It wasn't even exactly afraid or at least it wasn't the kind of fear that makes people run. It was the kind of fear that makes people go absolutely completely still.
Like a person who has been waiting for something for a very long time and doesn't know whether to be relieved or terrified that it's finally arrived. Claire, do you know what this is? She looked at the box. Not at me. At the box.
I don't know what's inside it, but you know something. It wasn't a question. She understood that I wasn't asking. She was quiet for 10, 15 seconds, long enough that a robin landed on the oak branch above us and decided we weren't interesting enough to stay. Then she said, "There's another one that needs filling, too." And she turned and walked back toward the house.
I didn't fill the hole. I covered it with the tarp and stacked a few sandbags along the edge to stabilize it. And then I went and knocked on Clare's back door. She let me in. We sat at her kitchen table.
She made coffee without asking if I wanted any. And she set a mug in front of me and she sat down across from me and she looked out the window at the tarp for a while before she said anything. His name was Daniel. She said it like she was answering a question I hadn't asked yet, like she'd been rehearsing that first sentence. Your husband.
He died 6 years ago. September, he was 39 years old. She wrapped both hands around her coffee mug. He was a firefighter, 15 years on the job. He was Everybody loved Daniel.
He was the kind of man who remembered the names of people's dogs. He coached little league even though we didn't have kids in the league anymore. He was, she stopped. He was not a complicated man. That's what I always thought.
That's what made it so hard to understand. Understand what? The last 8 months of his life. She finally looked at me. The last 8 months before he died, Daniel was somebody I didn't recognize.