The Side Of The Bed He Chose

And my husband, who does not talk, looked at me for a long moment, and then he pulled out the chair next to him, the one that had been my chair at that table for thirty four years, and he said, “Sit down, Nadine. I did this backward. I’m sorry. Sit down and I’ll tell you all of it.”

Here is what he told me.

Back in February, the cold snap week, he had been carrying feed out to the heifers and the whole world had gone tight and gray on him. A fist in the middle of his chest, he said, and his left arm heavy as a wet rope, and a dizziness that put him down on one knee in the lot with the bucket spilling. It passed. He stood up. He did not tell me. He drove himself, that fool, to the clinic in town two days later when it happened again in the shed, and the clinic sent him on to the heart man in Columbia, Dr. Alcorn, and Dr. Alcorn ran him through the machines and sat him down the way they do.

Blockage. Two arteries, one of them bad enough that the doctor used the word he had been carrying around alone ever since. The doctor said widow-maker, and told my husband that the thing in his chest could stop him some night in his sleep and that he needed a procedure, a stent and maybe more, and that in the meantime he was to keep his nitroglycerin on him and not do one single thing alone that he could not afford to do alone.

And Lyle had heard all of that, every word, and the first thing he thought about, sitting in that paper gown in Columbia, was not himself.

It was me.

“I kept thinking about the bed,” he said.

I did not understand. He took my hand across the oilcloth and he explained it to me slow, like he had turned it over a thousand nights in the dark kitchen, which I suppose he had.

“You sleep against the wall,” he said. “You always have. On your side, if something happens to me in the night, you have to climb over me to get to the door. To get to the phone. To get down the stairs.” He stopped. His thumb moved on the back of my hand. “I did the math, Nadine. If it takes me in my sleep, I did not want the last thing to be you fighting over the top of me in the dark, panicking, trying to get past your own husband to go call for help. I wanted the door side to be mine so I could get up and go without ever waking you scared. And I wanted you on the wall side, safe, so that whatever happened happened to me first and not between you and the way out.”