The Card My Husband Left Me

Nadine saw it on my face. She reached under the counter again and she took out an envelope, a plain white one, soft and worn at the corners from handling, with my name on the front in pencil. “He left this with me the second of March,” she said. “He made me promise. He said, do not mail it, she will not open it, she throws my things away. He said, when she comes, when she is ready, put it in her hand. So I am putting it in your hand, Ellen. He is three months in the ground and I have carried this every day.”

I did not open it in the bank. I could not. I drove out the county road with that envelope on the seat beside me like it was a live thing, and I pulled over at the turnout by the creek where Harlan used to take me when we were young, before the farm, before everything, and I shut off the truck and I opened it there.

I am going to tell you what the letter said. Not all of it. Some of it belongs only to me, the way the last page of a private thing should. But most of it you should hear, because most of it is the part that broke the six years open.

He wrote that in the September before he left, he had gone to the doctor in the city about his breath, how he could not climb to the barn loft anymore without the world going gray at the edges, and the doctor had sat him down and told him his heart was failing and would keep failing, slow some years and fast others, and that there would come a long stretch at the end of it, maybe years of it, where he would need a nurse and a chair and a hand to do everything a grown man ought to do for himself, and then the lungs, and then it would be ugly, and it would be long.

And he wrote that he had sat in that truck in the city parking lot and thought about his own father.

I had forgotten his father. Harlan’s father went the same way, the heart first and then the long bad end, and twelve-year-old Harlan had watched his own mother spend five years as a nurse to a man who did not know her at the finish, watched her go from a woman who sang in the kitchen to a gray thing that flinched when the phone rang, watched her lay her whole self down in that sickroom and never get up again even after the man was buried. Harlan had told me that story exactly one time in thirty-seven years, early, and never again, and I had not thought of it in decades.