The last letter in the can was dated this past winter. The handwriting was a grown man’s now. I read it standing in my own garage at one in the morning. He wrote that he was sick.

He wrote that he didn’t want anything from Gerald. He wrote that he wasn’t angry anymore, which somehow was the worst line in the whole thing. And at the bottom, the last thing this boy I never met ever wrote to my husband, he said, “I just wanted to meet you once with no secret on top of it. One time. That’s all.”

I don’t know how long I stood there. Gerald said my name from the doorway, real soft, the way he says it when he wants me to come to bed. I put the lid back on the can. I didn’t yell. I didn’t throw anything. I just walked past him into the house, and I noticed his face was wet, and for the first time in forty years I didn’t feel anything about that at all.

That was eleven days ago. The funeral was the day after the card came and neither of us went. Gerald’s been sleeping in the spare room. He made me coffee yesterday in the blue mug and I left it on the counter until it went cold. He keeps starting to explain and I keep walking out of the room. I haven’t told the girls. I don’t know how you tell two grown women that they had a brother for thirty-nine years and they’ll never get to meet him because their father kept him in a can.

The card is still on the kitchen table. I can’t bring myself to move it.

People keep telling me a thing like this, you either forgive it or you leave, like those are the only two doors. But nobody warns you about the third room, the one where you just sit at the table at midnight with a dead stranger’s funeral program and try to remember if the man you married was ever real. I keep reading that one line of the boy’s. One time. That’s all. I think about how easy that would have been. And I think Gerald could have given him that, and instead he gave him a coffee can.