The Side Of The Bed He Chose

I drove home shaking and said nothing, and I lay on the door side that night more certain than ever that I was losing my husband. I was. Just not the way I thought. Not to a woman. To his own tired heart, and to his own stubborn silence, and to my own refusal to ask the question that was sitting right there the whole time.

What broke it was Shelby.

Our daughter is a nurse. She works up at the regional hospital and she drives down to us most Sundays with her little ones, and she is her father’s child, which is to say she can go a whole visit telling you everything except the thing. That Sunday she was wrong in the face. She kept looking at Lyle and then looking away, and she dried the same plate three times, and when I said, “Shelby, what is the matter with you,” she set the plate down too hard.

“Ask Dad,” she said.

“I’m asking you.”

“It’s not mine to tell, Mama.” And her eyes went bright and she said, “But you need to ask him. You need to ask him tonight, because I cannot keep driving down here and watching you two not talk about it.”

I felt the floor tilt. “Shelby. Is your daddy sick.”

She did not answer me. She picked her babies up off the rug and she hugged me too long at the door, the way you hug somebody before a thing, and she drove off with her brake lights going red at the end of our gravel road, and I stood in the yard under the maple on my own side of the house and I knew I had been a fool in a direction I had not even guessed at.

I went in. Lyle was at the kitchen table. Dark again, lamp off, hands flat on the oilcloth.

I turned the light on. He squinted up at me.

“Lyle,” I said. “I found the card in your coat. Cardiology. And Shelby just stood in my kitchen and cried and told me to ask you.” My voice came apart. “So I am asking you. What is wrong with your heart, and why in God’s name did you make me find out by being scared of you for a month.”