The Thousand My Wife Laughed At
“You are a good man, Dale. Better than you let yourself be around that house. I hope you remember that you are your own man and not just the quiet one standing by the sink. Your mother would want me to say that and so I am saying it.
“Love, Dad.”
I read it three times in the cold truck and then I put my head down on the steering wheel and I cried the way I had not cried since my mother died.
My father did not die. I want to say that plainly, because I have told this part to people and I can see them bracing for it, and he did not. He woke up that afternoon, weak and gray and ornery about the hospital food, and the surgeon who would not make promises said it was close to a miracle, and Deacon Pruitt, who was still in the waiting room, said it was not close to anything, it was one.
He was in that hospital eleven days. And I want to tell you about the eleven days, because the eleven days are where I finally learned who I had married.
The whole county came. I am not exaggerating to make it sound nice. There was a sign-in book the hospital kept and it filled up and they started a second one. People I had never met. A man who told me my dad had paid off his hospital bill in 1994 and he never found out how until he thought to ask the billing office and they said an anonymous party. A woman who said that when she was a girl her family had no money for school clothes and every August a box would appear on their porch with coats in it, good coats, the right sizes, and no name. She said it happened for four years running and then stopped the fall she started working and could buy her own, and she had wondered her whole life who had been watching close enough to know her sizes and know the year to stop. She looked at me in that hallway and she said, “It was him, wasn’t it,” and I said I expected it was, and she sat down in a chair and put her face in her hands.
Diane came once. On the fourth day. She stood in the doorway of my father’s room in her good coat and she looked at all the cards and the flowers and the foil-wrapped dishes stacked on every surface, and she said, “My word, you’d think he was the mayor.” And then she looked at my father in the bed and she said, “Earl, you gave us all a scare,” in a voice like she was talking to a child, and she stayed eleven minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the wall. Eleven minutes, and then she said she had to get back, she had a thing, and she touched my arm and said, “Don’t stay all night again, you look terrible,” and she left.