The Side Of The Bed He Chose

I could not speak.

“That’s the first reason,” he said.

The first reason. There were more. Lyle, who does not talk, had reasons stacked up like cordwood.

“The second reason,” he said, and here his voice did the thing I had been afraid of all spring, it went thin, “is the window.”

“The window,” I said.

“You always loved that window,” he said. “Your whole life. Your mama told me when we were courting, she said Nadine will give up anything but she won’t give up a room with a window. And the first night in this house you took the left side under the window and I took the door, and I always told myself it was because I liked the door.” He shook his head. “I liked you having the window. That was the truth of it. Thirty four years I got to lie there and watch the morning come up on your face through that glass.”

He had to stop. So did I.

“And now,” he said, “if the doctor’s right and I’ve got less road than I thought, then I wanted to give it back to you proper. The window’s yours. Not borrowed. Yours. Because someday you might be waking up in this bed by yourself, and I could not stand the thought of you waking up to the wall. I wanted you waking up to the light and the maple and the yard. I wanted the last thing I fixed for you to be the view.”

I put my head down on my husband’s hands on that oilcloth and I cried the way you cry when the worst thing and the most tender thing turn out to be the same thing.

I need to back up and tell you about the list, because the list is the part that finished me.

A few days after that night at the table, before the procedure, I was out in the shed looking for the good pliers, and I opened the top drawer of Lyle’s workbench where he keeps the odds and ends, and under a coffee can of washers there was a spiral notebook. The cover said FOR NADINE in his block carpenter’s print.

I should not have opened it maybe. I opened it.

It was instructions. Pages of them, in his careful hand, going back weeks by the way the ink changed. How to bleed the furnace if it knocked in January. Which Hageman boy to call for the hay and how much was fair to pay him. That the property tax came due in December and the money for it was in the blue envelope in the gun safe and the combination was Shelby’s birthday run backward. That the well pump had maybe two winters left and here was the man to call and do not let him charge you for the whole unit, he will try. That the maple would need the dead limb over the porch taken down and Garrett could do it but make him use the rope.