The Name Tattooed On Her Arm
Little things I told myself not to see
She showered when we came inside, washed the road off her, and I heard the water run a long time. When she came out she had changed clothes, and she was wearing another long-sleeve shirt. A flannel one, soft and worn, one I had not seen since February. In the dead middle of the worst heat wave we had gotten in years, my wife had put on a winter flannel.
That was the first moment something cold moved through me. I did not know what it was. I told myself she felt chilled from the shower. I told myself women run cold. I told myself a dozen small comfortable things, because the alternative was to start asking a question I did not have the stomach for.
We made supper together, the two of us moving around the kitchen in the choreography you learn after thirty years, her at the stove and me setting the table, and she kept her sleeves down the whole time. When she reached up to the cabinet for the plates, she reached with her elbow tucked in against her side, careful, like a woman protecting a hurt she did not want you to see.
I noticed all of it. I want to be honest about that. I noticed and I decided not to notice, which is its own kind of choice. There is a comfort in a long marriage that can curdle into cowardice if you are not careful, and that night I was careful about the wrong thing. I was careful with the peace instead of careful with the truth.
We watched television after supper the way we always do, her curled against my side on the old couch with the springs going in one cushion. And somewhere in the middle of a show neither of us was really watching, Marlene fell asleep. She had driven, or been driven, a long way. She was tired down to the bone in a way that four days should not have made her.
She shifted in her sleep, mumbled something, rolled toward me. And her flannel sleeve, the winter flannel, slid up her forearm and caught above her elbow.
And I saw it.
The name under her sleeve
There, on the soft inside of my wife’s left forearm, wrapped in the shiny redness of skin that has just been through a needle, was a tattoo. Fresh. Days old. Letters an inch tall, dark and deliberate.
CODY.
I read it three times because my mind would not accept it the first two. CODY. A name. A man’s name. Not my name. My name is Gary. In thirty-one years my wife had never so much as mentioned a Cody. We did not know a Cody. We had no nephew, no neighbor, no friend, no cousin’s boy named Cody. There was no Cody in our church, in her family, in mine. And here was that name carved into her skin, fresh from a needle in Branson, hidden under two shirts in a heat wave, guarded through a whole supper.
I did not move. I sat there with my sleeping wife against my side and the television going and I felt like somebody had reached into my chest and scooped it hollow. My hands were cold. My ears were ringing. Thirty-one years, and I was looking at another man’s name written into the body I had loved and slept beside and grown old with, and I could not for the life of me make it mean anything but the one thing a man’s mind runs to in the dark.