The Box

He has gotten to everything. Except the one thing.

The loan Richie took out for the renovations is paid off a year early. His wife is the Warden of the prison on Route 9. He counts it up most nights, and it comes out the same every time: ten months of nothing getting worse. For a man who spent his whole life letting things go, that is close enough to a good life that he has stopped examining it.

Then the tank in the basement starts to weep a rust-colored tear down its side. He worked a parts counter nine years. He knows what rust at a seam means, and he knows what it means that he went back up the stairs anyway.

Behind the tank, on a cement shelf you cannot see from the stairs, there is a box. Brown paper and packing tape, wound so many ways you could not get a fingernail under it. A man handed it to him three winters ago. He has never opened it.

The Box is Part Two of Someday Is the Easiest Word I Know - the same unreliable voice, three winters on, telling you about a rust stain so he does not have to tell you about the shelf behind it. Richie has always been able to outlast a problem. This one has a clock in it.

He'll get to it. Someday.