The Side Of The Bed He Chose

That is how it got resolved, if resolved is the word. Not by any lawyer. Not by any paper, except the paper my husband wrote with his own hand to take care of me. It got resolved by a man finally saying the thing out loud, and by a daughter who loved us enough to make us say it, and by a town that showed up with food and hay and silence in the right amounts.

We never switched back.

I want to tell you that, because people ask. After the stent, after the good report, after the second opinion that was even better, you might think we would go back to the way the bed had been for thirty four years. We did not. Lyle sleeps on the left now, against the door, between me and the dark, and that is where he is staying.

And I sleep under the window.

The first morning home from the hospital I woke up before him, which almost never happened in our whole life, and the sun was coming up over the maple and laying itself across the quilt, and I turned my head and there was my husband asleep on the wall side where I had slept for thirty four years, his face soft, his chest going up and down, up and down, steady, stented, alive. And I understood that he had given me the thing he treasured most, which was the sight of me in the morning light, and he had done it by taking the lesser side for himself so that even in sleep he would be standing guard.

I lay there a long time and watched the light find him instead.

Janelle came by that week and had the grace, for once, to be wrong gently. She stood in our kitchen and she said, “I was sure it was another woman, Nadine.” And I said, “It was. It was me. He was rearranging the whole bed around keeping me safe, and I thought he was leaving.” Janelle did not have anything to say to that, which for Janelle is close to a miracle.

Shelby framed a copy of the last page of that notebook. Not the whole list, just the last page, the part that is not instructions. It hangs in our hall now by the back door, where Lyle sees it every time he goes out to the shed, and he pretends it embarrasses him, and it does not.