The Fiance Who Never Came
He came on the ninth day. He brought gas-station flowers and he stayed thirty-five minutes and he spent a good part of it on his phone in the corner by the window, half turned away, talking low. When he hung up he came and sat on the edge of the bed and held my good hand and told me how scared he had been, how he could not stand to see me like this, how he was not strong enough for hospitals, how he was dealing with it in his own way. He had tears in his eyes when he said it. I believed every word. I held his hand with the one hand I could move and I comforted him, from my hospital bed, for not being able to handle my hospital bed.
That is the part I am most ashamed of. Not that I was fooled. That I used the little strength I had to make him feel better about leaving me alone.
He visited twice more before I came home. Both times short. Both times with his phone. Both times he left feeling, I could tell, like a good man who had done a hard thing.
They moved me out of the ICU and onto the regular floor and then after a long dull stretch of healing they sent me home in the middle of February, in a wheelchair I would need for six weeks and then a walker after that. Jenny took family leave she did not have to spend to drive me. And when we came up County Road G and turned in at my grandmother’s house, I started to cry before the car even stopped, because there was a ramp.
A real ramp, built of good lumber, running from my front porch down to the drive at a gentle grade with a rail I could hold. Earl had built it. Earl and two of his nephews and a man from the co-op, over one Saturday, out of their own money, while I was still on the floor at the hospital learning to sit up. Marcy had organized a meal train that was taped to my refrigerator two pages deep. My freezer was a brick of casseroles and chili and a whole section somebody had labeled SOUPS FOR THE ARM in black marker, meaning things I could eat one-handed. Boone lost his mind in the driveway. The furnace was running warm because Earl had come over that morning and lit the pilot and bled the lines.
The whole town had carried my house while I was gone. I rolled up that ramp into a home that had been held together by the hands of people who had nothing to gain from it, and I understood, sitting in the doorway crying with my dog in my lap, that I had been rich my whole life and had been too distracted to notice.
And then I started to notice the other thing.
It took a few days, because at first I slept most of the day and the pain pills made the hours soft. But houses tell on people, and mine started telling on Brett.