The Side Of The Bed He Chose

“I like the dark,” he said. “Go on.”

I went. God help me, I went, because thirty four years teaches you when a man has shut a door, and I did not yet know it was not the door I thought.

The second thing I noticed was the phone. Lyle, who had never willingly held a telephone in his life, was suddenly stepping out to the shed to take calls. Low voice. Short. He would come back in and not say who it was, and when I asked he would say “the parts place” or “nobody” in a way that was not like him. Lyle did not lie. Lyle just stopped talking when he did not want to say, but this was different. This had the little false brightness of a man covering.

And the third thing, the one that undid me, I found on a Thursday when I was putting his winter coat away for the season. In the inside breast pocket there was a folded appointment card. A clinic in Columbia, an hour and change from us. A name I did not know, Dr. Alcorn, and under it, printed small, the word I read four times before it went in: Cardiology.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, on the door side, with that little card in my hand, and the whole spring rearranged itself in front of me. The nights up. The careful breathing at the kitchen table. The calls in the shed. And the bed. He had moved me to the door side and taken the wall for himself and I had been too busy being hurt to ask the one question a wife ought to ask, which is not why do you not want me, it is what are you not telling me because you love me.

But I did not ask it even then. That is the part I have to be honest about. Because by then my sister had gotten hold of me.

My sister Janelle lives in town, over by the water tower, and Janelle has never in her life met a worry she did not want to make bigger.

I told her about the bed because I had to tell somebody and she was who I had. I should have known better. Janelle got a look on her face like a woman settling into a good chair.

“Switched sides,” she said. “After all these years. Nadine, honey.” She let it hang. “A man doesn’t change the way he sleeps for no reason. That’s a nest thing. That’s an animal thing.”

“What are you saying, Janelle.”

“I’m saying Earl Minton moved to the far side of the bed the same spring he took up with the woman from the bank,” she said. “I’m saying men get restless and they start rearranging, and the first thing they rearrange is how far away from you they can get while still calling it a marriage.”