Walter and I were married forty-one years. He was a quiet man, a lineman for the power company most of his life, hands like tree bark, not one for big speeches. He said I love you maybe a dozen times total, and every one of them counted.

He got the diagnosis in October and he was gone by the middle of March. Pancreas. It moves fast and it doesn’t ask.

I got through the funeral on autopilot. Casseroles came and went. The church ladies were good to me.

And then everybody went back to their lives, and it was just me and the recliner that still had the shape of him in it.

My birthday is June 9th. I turned sixty-seven this year, and I was dreading it, because it was the first one in over four decades without him grumbling that I wouldn’t tell him what I wanted.

That morning the doorbell rang. A small box, actually wrapped in paper, not just a shipping box. And the card tucked under the ribbon was in Walter’s handwriting.

I stood in the doorway and my legs went out from under me a little and I had to sit down right there on the step.

Inside was a pair of gardening gloves, the good leather kind I’d been eyeing at the co-op for two years and always put back because they were too dear. The note said, in his blocky print: You wouldn’t buy these for yourself so I did it for you. Happy birthday, my girl. Get out in that dirt. Love, W.

He’d been gone three months.

I called the shop on the card, a little florist and gift place downtown run by a woman named Coreen. My hands shook so bad I dialed it twice wrong.

I told her who I was. And Coreen went quiet for a second, then said, soft, Oh, honey. He came in back in January. He could barely walk by then. His son drove him.

Walter had sat in her shop for two hours in January, dying, and he’d arranged and prepaid a birthday gift for me. Not just one.

Coreen told me he’d set up a standing order. One gift, delivered June 9th, every year.

I asked her how many years.

She didn’t answer right away. I could hear her pulling up something on a computer.

He was very specific, she finally said. He wanted them to keep coming as long as they could.

He paid ahead for as many as his savings would cover. She read me the number off her screen.

Fifteen. Fifteen birthdays. He’d figured out, roughly, how many years the table gave a woman my age, and he’d bought every single one of them, so that on every June 9th for the rest of my life, I would open my door and Walter would be standing there in the only way he still could.

I asked her what was in the rest. I don’t know why. Maybe I couldn’t stand to wait fourteen more years to find out what that quiet man had picked.

Coreen said he’d made her promise not to tell me. Every gift chosen ahead of time, sealed, labeled by year, sitting in a locked cabinet in her back room with my name on all of them.

He couldn’t give me forty-one more years, so he’d bought me fifteen mornings I would never have to spend wondering if he was still thinking of me.

I sat there on my kitchen floor with the leather gloves in my lap for a long time after I hung up the phone.

The house was too quiet, the way it had been every day since March, but for the first time the silence didn’t feel quite so empty.

I looked out the kitchen window at the tomato beds out back, all weed-choked and gray from the early spring. Walter always told me I let the crabgrass take over too easy.

I pulled the gloves on. They were stiff and smelled like new leather and linseed oil, exactly the way his tool belts used to smell when he brought them into the kitchen on a Friday night.

My hands fit inside them with a little room to spare at the fingertips, like he had guessed I might wear a pair of thin cotton liners underneath when the frost started biting in October.

I went out the back door and stood by the garden bed with a small trowel in my right hand. The earth was cold and damp, holding the last of the winter chill, but the sun was hitting the back fence just right.

I dug the first weed out by the root, shaking the dark dirt off the green runners the way he used to show me when we first bought the place back in seventy-eight.

If Coreen keeps her promise, and I know she will because Coreen is as stubborn as Walter ever was, I have fourteen more boxes waiting in that downtown back room. Fourteen Junes where a dead man reaches across time to tell me to get out in the dirt.

I don’t know what is in the box for when I turn eighty. I don’t know if he bought something foolish or something practical or something that will make me laugh until I cry.

I just know that when June 9th comes around next year, I won’t be sitting in the recliner waiting for the phone to ring. I’ll be right out here, wearing his gloves, keeping the garden clean the way he liked it.