The Side Of The Bed He Chose

The morning my husband asked to switch sides of the bed I was sure he was leaving me

For thirty four years I slept on the left side of the bed and Lyle slept on the right.

I want you to understand how settled that was. It was not a preference. It was not a thing we ever once discussed. It was the shape of our life, the way the kitchen is where you cook and the porch is where you sit in the evening when the heat finally breaks. The left side was mine the way my own hands are mine.

The right side, Lyle’s side, was the one nearest the door. His nightstand held the little brass lamp, his reading glasses, the paperback westerns he fell asleep over, and the alarm clock with the green numbers that I had learned to read backward in the dark through thirty four years of waking before him. My side, the left, was against the wall, under the window that looked out over the side yard and the old maple my father-in-law planted the year Lyle was born.

We married young. I was twenty one and he was twenty three, and we bought the farmhouse outside Hartwell from his uncle’s estate for a price that was really just a kindness dressed up as a sale. The bed came with the house in a way. It was an oak bed Lyle’s grandfather built by hand, heavy as a church pew, and the first night we slept in it Lyle took the right side without a word and I took the left and that was simply that. I do not think either of us chose. The bed chose for us, the way old things do.

So you can maybe start to feel it, the size of the small thing that happened, when I tell you that one Tuesday night in March, Lyle stood at the foot of that bed in his undershirt and his sock feet and said, “Nadine, I want to switch sides.”

I laughed. I thought he was making a joke I did not get yet.

He did not laugh. He stood there with his hand on the footboard and he said it again, quieter. “I want to switch. I want the left and you take the right.”

“You want my side,” I said.

“I want you on the door side,” he said. “Starting tonight.”

And something went cold in me that I could not have explained to you if you had asked me right then. I had been married to this man since Reagan was in office. I knew the sound of him lying and the sound of him telling the truth and the sound of him not telling me something because he did not want me worrying. This was that third sound. There was a wall behind his voice.