“I know I won’t be there. But neither will you be alone.” Mr. Harrison, the estate attorney, did not look at me when he pushed the taped-up cardboard shoebox across his desk.

It was a rainy Tuesday in May, just two weeks after we buried Roy.

Inside the box were forty-one sealed envelopes. Each one had a birthday written on the front in Roy’s careful block print.

He had started with my 66th birthday. That was the first one I would have to spend without him. The numbers went all the way to 90.

Roy Tillman was a quiet man. He spent thirty-four years working the line at the paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio. He drove an old blue Buick LeSabre with a rusted passenger door.

We bought that car used from a dealer in Columbus who saw us coming a mile away.

We lived on budget brand groceries and grew beefsteak tomatoes in the backyard to save money on the weekly bill. Roy was the kind of man who fixed a leaky faucet before you even noticed the drip.

He never once in fifty-three years of marriage raised his voice at me or the kids.

When the doctor told us the cancer was moving fast, Roy did not cry. He just nodded once and asked if we could stop at the hardware store on the way home.

He wanted to buy a new washer for the bathroom sink so I wouldn’t have to call a plumber later.

During his last six weeks, Roy spent every evening sitting at our yellow oilcloth kitchen table. His hands were already starting to tremble.

I could hear the scratching of his ballpoint pen through the ceiling while I tried to sleep.

He didn’t want me in the room while he wrote. He kept the shoebox on his lap or tucked under his side of the bed.

I thought he was just getting our bank papers in order. He spent six weeks on these.

I sat in the parking lot of the attorney’s office for a long time before I could drive home. The shoebox sat on the passenger seat of the Buick, right where Roy used to sit.

That first birthday alone, my 66th, was the hardest. Marlene had offered to stay, but I told her I wanted to be alone.

I made a pot of decaf coffee, sat in Roy’s green Sears armchair by the window, and opened the first envelope.

His writing was big and deliberate, the kind he used when he was trying to hide how much his hands were shaking.

He wrote about the day we met at the county fair. He reminded me to check the oil in the Buick every three thousand miles.

And he wrote that first line that I kept in my head for years: “I know I won’t be there. But neither will you be alone.”