I used to believe that the dead stayed where you left them.
For most of my life, that belief was the only thing that made certain memories bearable.
Danny Wirth had been gone for fifty-eight years, and I had spent nearly all that time believing I understood what had happened to him.
I was wrong.
But before I explain the flowers, the telephone call, and the old man waiting behind a green front door, I need to tell you about the yellow dress.
I was eighteen when I wore it to a dance in Reno.
It wasn't expensive.
My mother had helped me choose it, and I remembered worrying more about whether the hem looked even than whether anyone would notice me wearing it.
The fabric was bright enough that I couldn't disappear into a crowd.
I didn't particularly want to disappear, either.
When Danny approached me, I was standing near the edge of the dance floor, watching other couples move beneath the lights.
He looked nervous.
I noticed that before I noticed anything else.
He asked whether I wanted to dance, and I said yes before I could think of a reason to say no.
I wasn't the sort of girl who attracted much attention.
Everyone called me Sukey, a name that had followed me since childhood.
My actual name was Susan, but by the time I was old enough to object to the nickname, objecting would have felt stranger than answering to it.
Danny learned both names.
He used Susan when he wanted to sound serious.
Sukey was what everyone else called me.
But Dandelion was his.
He started calling me that because of the yellow dress.
I never asked him to explain the comparison.
I understood enough.
He thought I looked like one of those stubborn little flowers that grew where nobody had planted them.
I liked the idea of being something that could grow without anyone's permission.
I liked it even more because Danny was the one who had seen me that way.
He wrote the name differently, though.
Dandylion.
Every time I saw it on paper, I noticed the extra letter and the way he arranged the rest of the word.
I could have corrected him.
I never did.
There are things you leave alone because they are wrong, and there are things you leave alone because changing them would take away something you love.
That spelling belonged to the second category.
Danny's handwriting was never particularly neat.
His capital D leaned forward, giving the impression that the whole letter was tired and trying to get somewhere.
Even then, I found it familiar.
I could recognize his writing before I finished reading his name.
I didn't know that, decades later, a single crooked letter would make my hands shake.
Back then, I had more ordinary concerns.
I worried about money.
I worried about what my mother would say if I stayed out too late.
I worried about whether Danny liked me as much as I liked him.
Those were the problems of an eighteen-year-old girl.
I didn't know how quickly life could replace them with questions that never went away.
In October 1968, Danny asked me to marry him.
We were sitting on a bench beside the river in downtown Reno.
I can still picture the ordinary details more clearly than I can picture the expression on his face.
The bench.
The river.
The fact that I hadn't expected anything unusual to happen that afternoon.
Then Danny produced a ring.
The diamond was tiny.
I mean tiny.
It was the sort of stone that could have disappeared if I had dropped the ring into the grass.
The band wasn't much to look at, either.
By Christmas, it had begun turning the skin beneath it green.
I didn't care.
I wore that ring as though it were the most valuable thing I owned.
Because it was.
Not because of the diamond.
Not because of what other people might think when they saw it.
It mattered because Danny had placed it on my finger and asked me to share my life with him.
I was eighteen, and I believed the future was something we could simply walk toward together.
He was young, too.
We weren't experienced enough to understand all the ways a life could change without asking either person for permission.
We made plans in the way young people do.
We spoke as though there would be time to work everything out.
Then, nine days after he gave me the ring, Danny left for the Army.
Nine days.
I have repeated those words to myself so many times that they no longer sound like a measurement of time.
They sound like a mistake.
Nine days between believing I had found my husband and watching him leave.
I remember how little time there was to get used to the idea.
One moment, I was engaged.
The next, I was learning what it meant to wait for letters from a man who was no longer close enough to see.
Danny went away, and I stayed behind.
I had no way of knowing what the separation would eventually cost us.
At first, there were letters.
Thirty-one of them.
I saved every one.
They arrived over time, each one carrying some small piece of the person I had been missing.
I read them more than once.
Sometimes I read the same letter several times in one evening, then folded it carefully and returned it to its envelope.
I kept them in a Whitman's candy box.
The box was ordinary, the sort of thing that might have been thrown away once the chocolates were gone.
I couldn't throw it away.
At first, I kept it beneath my bed.
Later, I moved it into my closet.
Eventually, I put it inside my cedar chest, where it remained through the years that followed.
The box traveled with me from one stage of life to another.
It became something I didn't have to explain to anyone.
I could open it when I was alone.
I could read Danny's words and remember the girl who had worn yellow to a dance.
The girl who answered to Sukey.
The girl who had a ring that turned her finger green and believed that small things could still mean everything.
I was that girl.
But I was also someone who had to keep living.
Spring came in 1969.
Then the letters stopped.
I waited for another envelope.
I checked for mail.
I tried not to make too much of the silence because there were reasons letters could be delayed.
I told myself not to assume the worst.
I had no proof that anything terrible had happened.
I had only the absence of another letter.
That was the first time I learned how much room uncertainty could take up inside a person.
Days passed.
Then more days.
The mail came, and Danny's name wasn't on anything.
I kept the candy box.
I kept the ring.
I kept waiting longer than I should have.
In June, an envelope arrived from Danny's mother.
I knew who had written before I finished reading the letter.
She explained that she had traveled to Texas to be near her son.
Danny, she said, had suffered severe burns while overseas.
He had been transferred to a hospital in San Antonio.
And he hadn't survived.
I read those words.
Then I read them again.
I was nineteen years old.
I didn't have enough money for a bus ticket to Ohio, where she said he had been buried in her family's cemetery plot.
I didn't even think to ask which town.
That is one of the details I have regretted for years.
I accepted what she told me because I didn't know what else to do.
Her letter gave me no reason to believe there was anything left to question.
She told me not to make the journey.
There was nothing more for me to see, she wrote.
I should hold on to the Danny I remembered.
I did what she said.
Not because I wanted to.
Because I was nineteen, grieving, and unable to imagine that the mother of the man I loved might be telling me something other than the truth.
I went to my bedroom at my mother's house.
I lay down.
For an entire week, I barely left that room.
I wasn't brave.
I wasn't wise.
I was a young woman who had lost the person she expected to marry, and I had no idea how to put one ordinary day after another in front of me.
The yellow dress was still somewhere in my life.
The ring was still mine.
And the letters remained inside their candy box.
I didn't know what to do with any of them.
So I kept them.
Click here to continue reading: PART 2: I Married a Good Man and Loved Him Honestly, but One Small Candy Box Followed Me Into Every Home I Ever Called Mine
I Kept Thirty-One Letters From the Boy I Thought I Had Lost, Even After I Built a Whole Life With Another Man
Part 1 of 12
