The Day My Husband Would Not Help

He made a sound and turned his head.

“I’m bad,” I said. Three words took everything I had. “I can’t get it open. I need you to get up.”

He lifted the arm off his eyes and looked at the clock, and I watched him see that it was 4:20 in the morning. And something closed in his face. I have seen that look so many times I could draw it. It is not worry. It is the look of a man being inconvenienced.

“Did you take your puffer,” he said. Not a question. A thing to say so he could go back to sleep.

“It’s not opening. I need the machine and I need you to watch the kids if I have to go in.”

He let his head drop back onto the pillow. “You always do this,” he said, to the ceiling. “Every time something’s going on the next day, all of a sudden you can’t breathe.”

What was going on the next day was nothing. It was a Tuesday. He had a route and I had three kids and his mother to get through a day with. But that is the story he tells himself, that my lungs keep some kind of calendar, that they close up on purpose to ruin his mornings.

I did not argue. You cannot argue without air. I got myself up off the edge of the bed and I went down the hall, one hand on the wall, to the kids’ bathroom where I keep the nebulizer under the sink. That is my machine. It makes a mist of the medicine so I can breathe it in slow over about fifteen minutes when the inhaler is not enough. I sat down on the cold tile floor with my back against the tub and I got the mask over my face and I turned it on, and the little motor filled the dark bathroom with its rattle.

I sat on that floor by myself at four thirty in the morning and I breathed the mist and I listened to my husband go back to sleep down the hall.

I want to be fair to him, even now. Let me tell you what I was asking for, exactly, so you can decide what kind of thing it was.

I was asking for one day.

I run our house. I say that plainly because it is plainly true. I get three kids up and fed and to the bus. Hannah is fourteen, Cole is eleven, and Sam is six. I pack the lunches and I sign the folders and I know which kid has a dentist appointment and which kid needs cleats before Thursday. I do the wash for five people and I cook the supper and I keep the grocery list in my head. I clean the house. I pay the bills online at the kitchen table on the first and the fifteenth.

And I take care of Lorraine.