The Text From My Husband’s Phone

I took Mike’s shirts back out of that box one at a time while Craig stood there with his hands in his pockets, and I did not say a word, because I did not trust my own voice yet, and because some cold, careful part of me had already started keeping a list.

Jeff and Nicole were different with each other that week too, in ways that made my skin prickle every time I noticed it. Nicole, who cried at dog food commercials, barely cried at her own father’s funeral. Jeff kept stepping out to take calls he would not explain, standing in the gravel lot behind the funeral home with his phone pressed hard to his ear, and every time I asked who it was, he gave me an answer that arrived a half second too fast to be anything but rehearsed.

I want to be honest about where my mind went, because I am not proud of it. I thought about the store. I thought about the fact that Mike had never once, in thirty four years, sat me down and shown me exactly how the ownership was structured, because why would he, we were going to grow old together behind that same counter. I thought about a will I had not yet seen a copy of, and two grown children who were suddenly acting like people with something to manage rather than something to mourn, and a text message from my dead husband’s number telling me not to trust them.

For three days, I watched my own children the way you watch a stranger’s dog that has not decided yet whether it likes you.

I stopped answering Jeff’s calls the way I used to, quick and easy, mother to son. I let them ring twice longer than I needed to before I picked up, listening to my own voice for something guarded in it, and hating myself a little for finding it there. I told Nicole I had a headache when she asked to come over for coffee, which was a lie, and which she knew was a lie, because in twenty nine years I had never once turned my own daughter away from my kitchen table. I watched the two of them across every dinner that week the way Mike used to watch weather rolling in off the west field, waiting to see which direction it would break.

Meanwhile Craig kept showing up exactly on schedule, the way a man does when he has planned his schedule around your grief. He brought groceries I had not asked for. He fixed a dripping faucet in the downstairs bathroom without being asked, standing in my kitchen doorway afterward wiping his hands on a dish towel, saying, easy as breathing, that he did not know what I would do without somebody around to handle things like that now. He drove me to the bank on the Thursday after the funeral to talk to a woman about the safe deposit box, and he sat in the chair beside me the whole time, closer than a son in law needed to sit, nodding along at everything the bank woman said like he already knew the answers, and it was only afterward, sitting in his truck in the parking lot, that I realized he had steered the entire conversation toward whether the box could be added to with a second name on file.