The Side Of The Bed He Chose

“Why,” I said.

“I just want to,” he said. “Let’s just try it.”

I did not sleep right that night. I lay on the wrong side, on his side, with the brass lamp by my hand and the door right there in the dark, and I listened to him breathe against the wall under my window where I had slept for thirty four years, and I felt like a guest in my own marriage.

I should tell you about Lyle, so you do not get the wrong idea early.

He is not a talker. He never was. He farmed a little and he fixed small engines in the shed for half the county, and he coached the Hartwell junior league for eleven summers without ever once raising his voice at a boy who dropped a fly ball. When our Shelby was small and running a fever that would not break, it was Lyle who sat up in the kitchen rocker holding her so I could sleep, and he never told me he had done it. I found out years later from Shelby herself, who remembered it the way children remember the one safe thing.

That was Lyle. He did the loving and he did not announce it. For thirty four years I had read him through his hands and his silences and the direction he parked the truck so the wind would not catch my door. I was good at it. I was proud of being good at it.

Which is why the bed thing went through me like it did. Because for the first time in a long marriage, I could not read him.

So I did what I am ashamed to tell you I did. I started watching him like he was a stranger who had moved into my house.

The first thing I noticed, once I was looking, was the nights.

Lyle had always slept like a stone. Head down by nine, gone till the rooster. But that spring he was up in the dark. I would surface at two or three in the morning, there on the door side now, and his place against the wall would be empty and cold, and I would hear him down in the kitchen. Not doing anything. Just sitting. I would hear the chair, and then nothing, and then a long time later the stairs again.

One night I came down in my robe and found him at the kitchen table with the light off, both hands flat on the oilcloth, breathing slow and careful like a man counting.

“Lyle,” I said. “What in the world.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Go on back up, Nadine. I’m fine.”

“You’re sitting in the dark.”