Because that was me. That was me my whole life. My mother raised five kids on nothing and never once let a neighbor bring a casserole without sending back two. Pride. We called it pride like it was a good thing.

When Harold got sick, you know what I did? I argued with him about money. I’m not proud of this. We had eight months and I spent some of them snapping at him about the hospital bills, about how we couldn’t afford the good insurance, about how I’d go back to work. He’d just look at me. “Let me handle it, Carol.” And I’d get mad. I thought he was being stubborn. I thought he didn’t get how scared I was.

He got it. He got it better than I did.

There’s a thing I keep coming back to. About a month before he died he asked me, out of nowhere, “Who’s going to do your oil changes?” And I laughed at him. I actually laughed. I said, “Harold, I am dealing with you dying and you’re worried about my oil?” He didn’t laugh back. He just nodded a little, like I’d answered a question he was really asking. I didn’t think about it again for six years. I think about it every day now.

Because that’s what he was doing. He was lying in a hospital bed with a tumor eating him alive, and he was making a list in his head of every single thing he wouldn’t be around to fix. The porch. The faucet. The car. Me.

Rudy wasn’t done. He reached back into the drawer and pulled out something else. A sealed envelope. White, regular, the kind you’d grab from a junk drawer. And there was my name on the front.

Carol. In his handwriting. That slanted, terrible handwriting I used to tease him about, the one I’d give anything to find on a grocery list now.

“He left this too,” Rudy said. His voice cracked a little. This big guy with grease on his hands. “He said to give it to you when the car hit two hundred thousand. Not before. He said you’d know it was time.”

I didn’t open it there. I couldn’t. I drove home with it on the passenger seat and I kept looking at it at every red light like it might disappear.

I sat at the kitchen table. The same table where I’d argued with him about money. And I opened it.

I’m not going to share all of it. Some of it’s just mine. But the part I keep reading, the part I have memorized now, was this.

“Carol. If you’re reading this, the car made it longer than I did. Good. I told you that thing had life in it. You never listen.”

I could hear him. I swear to God I could hear him saying it.