The Woman He Called No Fun

So I sang it again.

The coming back was not pretty and it was not easy and nobody wrote me a song about it, so I will tell you what it actually looked like. It looked like me sneaking out to the truck in the church lot on a Sunday to do breathing exercises off a video Maddie found me, feeling like a fool, hoping nobody walked by. It looked like my throat aching the next morning from muscles I had not used in years. It looked like me burning a pan of cornbread because I was in the kitchen working out a harmony in my head instead of watching the oven, and Greg making a face at the smoke, and me not apologizing for the first time in I do not know how long.

I started saying yes to things again, small things. I said yes when the nursing home asked the choir to come carol. I said yes when Tammy wanted to drive the forty minutes to Lafayette just to hear a band play on a Friday, and I got a sitter, which I had not done for myself in six years, and I stood in the back of a loud bar with my oldest friend and I felt eighteen and forty at the same time, and I cried in the truck on the way home, but it was the good kind of crying, the kind that means something frozen is thawing.

Greg noticed. He did not like it. A man who has gotten used to a wife who does not leave the house does not always clap when she finds the door. He started with little digs, asking who did I think I was, asking if the kids were just going to raise themselves now, asking what a woman my age was doing running around singing like a teenager. And every one of those digs, which a year before would have put me right back in my chair, did the opposite now. Every one of them was a hand on my back pushing me toward that stage. He did not know it, but he was helping.

Here is the part I did not know while it was happening, the part my daughter told me later, crying, so I am going to tell it to you the way she told it to me.

Maddie had heard her daddy in that kitchen. Maddie had grown up watching me get smaller, and she was the one who remembered me the biggest, because she was the oldest, because she had been there for the anthem and the Grange hall and the red dress. And when she heard Greg say I was nobody and the kids did not know me either, something in my daughter went as still and as done as it had gone in me.