The Card My Husband Left Me

He wrote: “I could not do it to you. I know that it was not mine to decide. I have had six years to learn that it was not mine to decide, and if I had it back I would decide it different, I would let you choose, because you were always braver than me and you would have stayed and you would have carried it and you would have made it holy somehow, the way you make everything. But I was not brave. I was a coward with a bad heart and I could not stand in that kitchen and watch your face the day you understood what was coming for us. So I did the only thing my coward’s mind could think of. I made myself the villain. I left you whole and strong and angry on the land you love instead of bent double over a dying man for the back half of your good years. I knew what the town would say about Faye and me. I let them say it. I needed you to hate me, Ellen, because I knew if you did not hate me you would come to that room and you would nurse me and I would not be able to send you away twice.”

And then he wrote about Faye.

Faye Carraway, he wrote, was a home-health nurse. She had buried her own husband two years before and she knew the road he was on better than anyone in the county, and she had come to that room above the hardware store three and four times a week for six years to check his heart and fill his pill case and drive him the ninety miles to the city when the specialist needed to see him and sit with him on the bad nights when the fear of it got big. She had kept his secret because he begged her to. She had taken the whole town’s ugly talk on her own back, a decent widow woman letting herself be called a homewrecker, because a dying man asked her to help him protect the wife he was too proud and too scared to protect any other way. “She is a better Christian than I ever was,” he wrote. “When you are ready, you go and you thank her, and you tell her I said she can finally tell the truth.”

The last thing he wrote, I will give you, because it is the thing I say to myself now on the hard mornings.

“The money is not a payment, Ellen. I know that is what the card looked like. I wrote four words because I could not write forty without telling you everything, and telling you everything was the one thing I could not do. The money is just the only language I had left. Every first of the month for six years I walked to Nadine’s window and I put down what I could and it was the only way I had to say I am still here and I still love you and I am still taking care of you even from across this town where you cannot see me do it. Thirty-seven years I took care of you. I was not going to stop just because I had to do it in the dark. Be well. I meant it. It is the truest thing I ever wrote. Be well, Ellen. Be well for both of us.”