The Side Of The Bed He Chose

Page after page. My whole life, the parts I never carried because he carried them, written down so I could carry them after him. He had been sitting in that dark kitchen at two in the morning, the man I had suspected of running around on me, writing down how to keep me warm and safe and unbothered in a world without him in it.

The last page was not instructions. The last page said:

“Nadine. If you are reading this and I am not here, I did not switch sides of the bed to get away from you. I switched so I would always be the one between you and the dark. Take the window. I love you more than I ever said out loud. Lyle.”

I stood in that cold shed and I understood thirty four years of a quiet man all at once. The way he parked the truck. The way he took the chair in the night with the sick child. The way he always walked on the road side of me on the shoulder going to church. He had been standing between me and the dark our entire married life, and I had read it as a man who did not say much, when really it was a man who said everything and just never used his mouth to do it.

The procedure was the Monday after Easter.

I drove him to Columbia myself in the dark and we did not talk much, which for us was the right amount of talking, and Shelby met us there in her scrubs and held both our hands in the waiting room when they wheeled him back. The stent went in clean. Dr. Alcorn came out and told us the widow-maker was open, that the muscle looked better than he feared, and that if Lyle would eat right and walk every day and take his pills, there was a lot of road left after all. More than Lyle had let himself believe when he was writing that notebook alone in the dark.

Hartwell is a small place and small places know how to hold you. By the time we got Lyle home there was a casserole on the porch and the church ladies had a schedule going for a week of suppers. The Hageman boys had our hay in without being asked and would not take a dollar. Pastor Reynolds came by and sat with Lyle on the porch and did not preach at him, just sat, which is its own kind of grace. Old Dub Carter, who Lyle coached in junior league thirty years back and who is a grandfather now himself, drove out just to shake my husband’s hand and could not get a word out, and Lyle said, “I know, Dub. I know,” and they stood there on the gravel not talking, which between two men from here is a whole conversation.