My name is Margaret. I’m seventy-four, and since Tom passed, the only voice in my house that isn’t the radio is Pepper, his grey parrot.
Every evening at six, Pepper climbs to the top of the bookshelf, faces the third shelf from the bottom and says, in Tom’s exact voice: ‘Check the blue one, Maggie.’
For two years I assumed it was only something Tom used to say. Which blue one? The blue vase? The blue coat? I searched everything blue in the house.
Last night the power went out and I lit a candle. Pepper climbed up, faced the shelf as always and said it. This time I followed the direction of his eye. It wasn’t a vase. It was a single dusty blue book spine that I had never opened.
I took it down. The pages had been cut out to hold a small brass key and a folded sheet of paper.
It was Tom’s handwriting, shaky, from the last month of his illness. ‘Maggie, if you are reading this, Pepper has done his job. He is a better secret-keeper than I am.’
The key opened a safety deposit box at the bank on Elm Street. I went the next morning, still in my slippers under my coat.
Inside was a savings book for an account I had never heard of, opened the year we married. Fifty years of small monthly deposits, and a note: ‘For the trip to Portugal we never took.’
There was enough for two tickets, a small hotel by the sea, and a week of the best coffee in the world. Tom had counted it all out.
I sat on the bank’s marble floor and laughed and cried until the manager brought me a glass of water.
I flew to Lisbon in May with Pepper’s travel cage on my lap. I stood on a cliff with the wind in my hair.
On the last evening, in the hotel room, Pepper hopped onto the balcony rail, looked at the sunset and said in Tom’s voice, ‘There you are, Maggie.’
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