Annie Callahan teased her husband for decades about peeking at endings, the way a boy sneaks pie before supper. When Joe passed away in his armchair with a mystery novel resting open on his chest, she could not bring herself to touch it all winter. One quiet evening in March, she finally reached for it, and the old paperback opened exactly where he had wanted her to find it.
PART 1 — THE LAST PAGE FIRST
My husband read the last page of every book first.
Forty-four years of paperbacks, and he peeked at the ending of every single one. Right in the library aisle, sometimes. Like a boy sneaking a slice of pie before supper.
It drove me wild.
“Joe Callahan,” I would say, “you’re ruining it. The whole point of a story is not knowing.”
He would just smile that crooked smile of his and say, “I like knowing things turned out all right before I get attached, Annie.”
Then he would close the book, tuck it under his arm and read it from the beginning, perfectly content, while I shook my head at him.
I am seventy-two years old. I have been a reader my whole life. I was a school librarian in Duluth, Minnesota, for thirty-one years. I have read thousands of books without ever once skipping ahead.
Joe was a mail carrier. He did not start reading seriously until he was in his thirties, when I left a Louis L’Amour western on the kitchen table and he picked it up out of boredom one snowy evening. After that, he was hooked. Westerns at first, then mysteries, then sea stories, then anything with a map in the front.
But he always, always read the ending first.
I teased him about it at dinner parties. I told our friends about it. I told our daughter, Molly, when she was little, and she started doing it too, just to annoy me. They would sit on the couch together and peek at last pages and giggle while I pretended to be outraged.
Over the years, it became one of those silly things a marriage is built on. A running joke. A small war we both enjoyed losing.
I never once asked him why he really did it. I assumed I knew.
PART 2 — OCTOBER
Joe died in October, in his chair, halfway through a novel.
It was a Tuesday evening. I was in the kitchen washing the supper dishes. He was in his old brown recliner by the window, the one with the cracked leather arm he refused to replace. He was reading a sea story about a lighthouse keeper on Lake Superior. He had been reading it all week, a chapter or two every night.
When I came in with his cup of tea, he was very still. The book was resting open on his chest. His reading glasses had slipped down his nose.
I thought he had fallen asleep. He often did.
“Joe,” I said. “Your tea.”
He did not answer.
The doctor said it was his heart. Quick and peaceful, he said. Probably no pain at all. He said Joe likely just closed his eyes.
Seventy-four years old. Forty-four years married.
The funeral was at our church on the hill. Molly flew in from Seattle with her husband and our two grandsons. Joe’s old mail route customers came. Some of them I had never met. One woman told me Joe had brought her mail to her door for eleven years after her hip surgery, instead of leaving it in the box at the street, and had never once let her thank him.
After the funeral, after everyone left, I came home to a quiet house.
The lighthouse novel was still on the lamp table beside his chair, where the paramedics had set it. His bookmark, an old postcard from Lake Superior, still marked page 211.
I could not touch it. I could not shelve it. I could not throw it away. It sat there on the lamp table all winter, holding his place.
PART 3 — THE WINTER
Duluth winters are long. That one felt longer than most.
The snow came early in November and did not stop. I stayed in the house mostly. Molly called every evening. My neighbor, Bev, brought casseroles and sat with me on Thursdays. My friends from the library came by with pies and stories.
But every evening, when the house got quiet, I sat in my chair across from Joe’s empty recliner and looked at that book.
Sometimes I picked it up. I held it. I put it back down.
I could not make myself open it.
Molly asked me about it over the phone in January. “Mom, do you want me to finish it for you? Read it and tell you how it ends?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to know how it ends.”
“Why not?”
I did not have an answer. Or I did, and I did not want to say it out loud.
If I opened that book and read to the end, then Joe’s story would be finished too. Page 211 was where he had stopped. As long as the bookmark was there, some foolish part of me believed he might come back and pick it up again.
I know how that sounds. Grief makes us foolish. Grief makes us cling to bookmarks.
One night in February, I dreamed Joe was sitting in his chair, reading. When I asked him how it ended, he just smiled and turned the page. I woke up crying and did not go back to sleep.
So the book sat there. December. January. February. Into March.
I dusted around it every Saturday. I never moved it an inch.
PART 4 — MARCH
Last night, finally, I decided it was time.
The snow had started to melt. The days were getting longer. Molly was coming to visit in April with the boys, and I wanted to clear the lamp table and put out some fresh flowers before they came.
So I made a cup of tea. I sat in Joe’s chair for the first time since October. It still smelled faintly of him. Pipe tobacco and peppermints and the cold outdoors.
I picked up the lighthouse novel.
I meant to shelve it. That was all. I was going to take it to the bookcase in the hallway and put it between the other sea stories and close the chapter.
But as I lifted it, the book fell open in my hands. Not at page 211, where the bookmark was. At the very end.
The way a book falls open where it has been held the most. The way a spine remembers where it has been bent.
Joe had read that last page first, of course. Probably the very first night he brought it home from the library sale. And he had held it open there long enough for the spine to crack.
I almost closed it. I did not want to know the ending. I did not want to cheat, even now.
But then I saw the margin.
In the white space beside the last paragraph, in Joe’s small, careful pencil handwriting, the handwriting I had seen on forty-four years of grocery lists and birthday cards and notes left on the kitchen counter, there was a note.
It was addressed to me.
It began: “Annie. If you’re reading the ending first, then you finally…”
PART 5 — THE NOTE
I had to put on my glasses. My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped the book.
“Annie. If you’re reading the ending first, then you finally understand why I always did it.
“It’s not that I didn’t like surprises. It’s that I was afraid. My whole life, things didn’t turn out all right. My father left. My mother was sick. My brother didn’t come home from the war. I learned early not to get attached to anything until I knew it would last.
“Then I met you. And for the first time in my life, I didn’t need to check the ending. I just knew. Forty-four years, and I never once peeked at us.
“But I’m getting older, Annie. My heart’s been doing funny things. The doctor wants more tests. I haven’t told you, because you’d worry, and you worry enough for both of us. So I’m writing this in the back of a book, where I know you’ll never look. Unless you finally learn to cheat.
“If you’re reading this, I’m gone, and you’re sad, and you couldn’t bring yourself to finish my book. I know you. You’d leave it right where I left it, with the bookmark in.”
I put my hand over my mouth. He knew me so well. Even then.
“So here’s the ending, sweetheart. It turned out all right. Every bit of it. Forty-four years with you was the best story I ever read, and I didn’t need to skip ahead even once.
“Now go to the kitchen. Look on page 214 of your mother’s old cookbook. The red one. I left you one more surprise. This time, don’t peek ahead. Just go.
“I love you. I always will. Joe.”
I read it three times. Then I set the book down on his chair, very gently, and went to the kitchen.
PART 6 — PAGE 214
My mother’s old cookbook was on the top shelf above the stove, where it had been for forty years. A red cloth cover, faded and stained. I had not opened it in years. Neither of us had. I mostly cooked from memory now.
I took it down. I opened it to page 214.
It was the recipe for my mother’s apple cake. The one I made every year on our anniversary.
Tucked between the pages was a thick envelope. My name was written on the front, in the same careful pencil.
Inside were three things.
The first was a savings passbook from our credit union, the old-fashioned kind with stamped entries. It was in Joe’s name, with me as the beneficiary. The account had been opened in 1981. The year we married.
Every month for forty-four years, Joe had deposited twenty dollars. Then fifty. Then, after he retired, a hundred. The balance on the last page was a little over sixty-one thousand dollars.
The second was a brochure. Worn, folded, dog-eared. A tour of Ireland. Two weeks. The west coast. Galway. The Cliffs of Moher. A little village called Doolin, with music in the pubs every night.
My grandmother was born near Doolin. I had always wanted to see it. I talked about it for forty years. We never went. There was always a reason. Molly’s braces. A new roof. Joe’s knee surgery. My mother’s long illness.
I remembered the night I first said it, on our honeymoon at a little motel on the North Shore. We were sitting on a picnic table watching the lake. I told him about my grandmother’s stories of the stone cottages and the music. He listened and said nothing. I did not know he had kept it for forty-four years.
The third thing was a short letter.
“Annie. The Ireland fund. I started it the year we married, because you told me on our honeymoon that someday you wanted to see where your grandmother came from. I kept meaning to surprise you. Every year, something came up. I’m sorry I didn’t make it in time.
“Go anyway. Take Molly. Take the boys. Sit in a pub in Doolin and listen to the fiddles and think of me. That’s the real ending, sweetheart. Don’t peek. Just go.”
PART 7 — MOLLY
I called Molly at eleven o’clock that night. It was nine in Seattle.
I could barely speak at first. I read her the note from the book. Then the letter from the cookbook. I read her the balance in the passbook.
She was quiet for a long time on the other end of the line.
“Mom,” she said finally, her voice thick. “He told me about the Ireland fund.”
“He what?”
“When I was in college. He made me promise never to tell you. He said he was going to surprise you for your fortieth anniversary. Then Grandma got sick, and you spent two years taking care of her. Then his knee. He kept saying next year.”
“Forty-four years,” I whispered. “He saved for forty-four years.”
“Mom,” Molly said, “he also told me something else, last summer. When we were sitting on the dock at the lake.”
“What?”
“He said his heart was acting up. He made me promise not to tell you that either. He said if anything happened to him, I should make sure you went to Ireland. He said you’d fight me on it. He said to tell you, ‘Joe said don’t peek, just go.'”
I sat in my kitchen with the red cookbook open in front of me and cried harder than I had cried at the funeral.
When I could finally speak again, I said, “Molly, will you come with me?”
“Mom,” she said, “I’ve already looked at flights.”
I laughed for the first time in months. “Of course you have,” I said. “You’re your father’s daughter. You always looked ahead.”
PART 8 — IRELAND
We went in June. Molly, her husband, Ben, my two grandsons, Sam and Danny, and me.
My first time on a plane in twenty years. My first time out of the country in my entire life.
We flew into Shannon. We rented a big van that Ben drove on the wrong side of the road with great courage and occasional swearing. We drove along the coast through green hills and stone walls and sheep standing in the middle of the road like they owned it.
We stood on the Cliffs of Moher in a howling wind. The boys ran along the path, shrieking with joy, while Molly and I held on to each other and the railing and looked out at the endless gray Atlantic.
And on our fourth night, we drove to Doolin. A tiny village of whitewashed cottages and stone pubs at the edge of the sea.
Molly had arranged for us to visit the church where my grandmother was baptized, a small gray stone building with a crooked bell tower. The priest let us look at the old register. There was her name, in faded ink, from 1902. I touched it with one finger.
We went to a pub called McGann’s. It was crowded and warm and smelled like woodsmoke and stew. In the corner, five musicians played fiddles, a tin whistle, a guitar and a little drum.
We found a table near the fire. Ben bought a round. The boys drank lemonade and tapped their feet. Molly held my hand under the table.
I sat there listening to the music, and I thought about Joe. About his crooked smile. About forty-four years of twenty-dollar deposits. About a pencil note in the margin of a lighthouse novel.
An old man at the next table, white-haired, in a flat cap, noticed me crying and leaned over.
“Are you all right, missus?”
“Yes,” I said. “My husband sent me here. He couldn’t come himself.”
The old man nodded slowly, as if he understood completely. Then he raised his glass toward me and said, “To your husband, then. He has good taste in places.”
PART 9 — THE LIGHTHOUSE BOOK
When we came home in July, I finally finished Joe’s book.
The lighthouse novel. I started at the beginning and read it all, the way I always read. I did not skip ahead. I already knew the ending, after all, and I wanted to earn it properly.
It was a good book. The lighthouse keeper’s wife waits for him through a terrible winter storm on Lake Superior. Everyone in town says he is lost. She keeps the light burning every night anyway. In the last chapter, he walks back across the ice.
I understood, reading it, why Joe wrote his note in that particular book. A story about someone waiting through a long winter. About keeping the light on. About an ending that turns out all right.
I think he chose it on purpose. I think he knew, somehow, that I would be the one left waiting.
The book sits on my nightstand now, not on the shelf. The postcard bookmark is still in it, at page 211, where he stopped. I never moved it.
I read his note in the margin sometimes, on hard nights. Not every night. Just when I need to.
And I have started doing something I swore I would never do.
When I bring a new book home from the library, I read the last page first.
Not because I am afraid of how it ends. Because I like to imagine Joe beside me, in his brown recliner, peeking over my shoulder, grinning that crooked grin.
“See, Annie?” I can almost hear him say. “It turns out all right.”
PART 10 — WHAT I KNOW NOW
It has been a year now since Joe died.
I still live in our house in Duluth. I still sit in my chair across from his recliner in the evenings. But I do not just look at it anymore. Sometimes I sit in it, with a book and a cup of tea.
I started a little lending library on the corner of our yard last spring, the kind in a wooden box on a post. Bev’s husband built it for me. Joe’s books are in it. Westerns, mysteries, sea stories. Inside the front cover of each one, I wrote a small note in pencil.
“Go ahead. Read the last page first. It’s all right.”
Neighbors stop by every day. Children. Old men. Young mothers with strollers. I watch them from my kitchen window, picking out Joe’s books, and every time, it makes me smile.
I have been married, and widowed, and I have learned something that took me seventy-two years to understand.
The people we love are not always as brave as we think they are. Some of them peek at endings because the world has hurt them too many times. Some of them hide their fears in the margins of books and their love in the pages of old cookbooks.
If you have someone like that in your life, be patient with their little habits. The things that drive you wild might be the very things that are holding them together.
And if you are the one who has been hiding a note somewhere, waiting for the right time, please do not wait too long. Tell them now. Let them read the ending while you are still beside them. It will turn out all right.
