The Casserole With No Name

Here is the part I did not learn until this past year, standing on my own porch. Here is the thing I had missed for forty years.

I thought I knew what my wife did that winter. I thought I knew the shape of it, because Peg told me a girl from town was staying in our spare room for a while, a girl who had trouble at home, and would I mind.

I said I did not mind. God help me, that is the whole of what I did. My wife asked me a small question in our kitchen and I said I did not mind, and I went back to my supper, and I never asked another thing about it.

I was not a cruel man. I want you to know that. I was a busy man and a quiet man and a man who thought the inside of a house was his wife’s country and not his, and so I did not go in.

Junie stayed in our spare room that whole winter. I would see her at breakfast sometimes, a shy girl who did not say much, getting bigger under her sweater, and I would nod to her and go to work.

I thought Peg was just being soft. That is the word I used in my own head for forty years. Soft. Peg is soft, Peg takes in strays, that is just Peg.

I did not know that Peg sat up with that girl the nights she cried. I did not know Peg drove her forty miles to the clinic in the next county so nobody in Alden would talk, and paid for it out of the grocery money and made it stretch so I would not notice.

I did not know that when the baby came early in a March snowstorm, and the roads were closed, and the ambulance could not get through, it was my wife who delivered that child on the bed in our spare room with a church cookbook open to the wrong page and her own two hands.

I slept through it. That is the truth that I have had to sit with this year. The most important night that ever happened under my roof, and I slept through it on the other side of the wall, because Peg told me to go on to bed, she had it handled.

She had it handled. My wife brought a life into the world forty feet from where I slept, and in the morning she made me eggs and did not say one word about it, and I ate the eggs and went to the elevator.

The baby was a girl. Junie stayed with us until the spring, until she was strong enough, and then her aunt down in Kansas City took her and the baby in, and they left Alden, and I honestly did not think about it again for forty years.