The Card My Husband Left Me

She came home. She is back in her own church now, in her own pew, and the town that whispered about her for six years brings her casseroles when she is sick and sits with her at the Dutch Kitchen, and more than one of them has told her to her face that they were wrong. She and I take coffee together on Tuesdays. She tells me things about Harlan’s last years that I ache to have missed and am grateful to be given, little things, how he kept my picture on the windowsill where the morning light hit it, how he asked her once if she thought a man could be forgiven for doing a wrong thing for a right reason, how near the end he would get confused in the evenings and think he was back on the farm and call out for me to come look at the sunset over the wheat. We are not supposed to be friends, Faye and I. The whole town knows we are not supposed to be able to sit in the same room. We sit in the same room every Tuesday. Grief is a strange country and it makes strange neighbors, and I would not trade her for anything now.

As for the money.

I thought a long time about the twenty-six thousand dollars. I could have put it against the farm, and Lord knows the farm needed it, and I think Harlan would have been fine with that, it was his land too and his whole life was in that dirt. But it did not feel right to pour his six years of two-hundred-dollar love into a transmission or a tax bill. It needed to go somewhere that meant what he meant.

So I gave half of it to the county home-health fund, the one that pays for a nurse to come out to the farms where the old folks are dying the slow way, the way Harlan’s father died, the way Harlan himself died, so that the next proud, scared man out on some county road does not have to choose between being a burden and being alone. I put it in both our names. The Harlan and Ellen Teague fund. And the other half I am holding, because I am sixty-three and my own heart is just a heart like anybody’s, and someday it may be my turn to need a nurse on the Ellsworth road, and when that day comes I will not be too proud to be cared for. I learned that from a card with four words in it. It took me six years and a bank teller and a letter by a creek, but I learned it.

The card is not in the Bible anymore. I had it framed, the cheap watercolor sunrise and the four words in pencil, and it hangs in my front room where the morning light hits it, which is where he kept my picture, and I did not plan that, it just happened that way, and I take it as a sign. “For you. Be well.” I read it most mornings. It does not say what I thought it said for six years. It never did. It was never a tip left on a finished meal. It was a man standing at the far edge of his own life, holding a love he was too broken to carry across the room to me, setting it down the only place he knew it would keep, and trusting that someday I would be ready to pick it up.

I was ready. I am sorry it took so long. Be well, Harlan. I mean it the way you meant it. Be well, for both of us.