The Bedroom I Asked For

That was Wednesday.

Wednesday night I came home from the mill, and I mean I came home to Faye’s, and the whole house smelled like pot roast.

She’d had it in the oven since two o’clock with potatoes and carrots and onions all around it.

“Wash your hands,” she said. “Earl’s coming over at six. He always comes on pot roast night. You’ll have to put up with him.”

Earl came across the road at six exactly in a clean flannel shirt. He has been a widower for nine years.

He shook my hand very formally, like we’d never met, though I’ve known him since I was twenty-two.

He didn’t ask one question about the suitcase. He talked about the Braves and the price of hay and whether it was going to frost by the weekend.

When Faye went to get the tea, he leaned over to me.

“Faye told me about the letter last month,” he said quietly. “I’m the one told her to call that boy. I didn’t figure he’d do it like this. I’m sorry for my part in it.”

“You don’t have a part in it, Earl,” I said.

“Everybody’s got a part in something,” he said, and sat back as Faye came in with the pitcher.

Meanwhile, fifteen minutes down the road, my husband was eating Frosted Flakes.

I know this because Kaylee told me. She drove out to our house Thursday after her clinical to borrow the big cooler, and she found her daddy standing at the counter with a bowl of cereal at six thirty in the evening.

“Mama,” she said on the phone that night, “he says he’s had cereal three nights running. He says he doesn’t know how to work the oven. Mama, he’s forty-nine. He drives a truck full of propane for a living. He knows how to work an oven.”

“He knows how,” I said. “He’s choosing not to.”

“Are you getting a divorce?” she asked. Her voice went thin and young on the last word, like she was nine again.

“No, baby,” I said. “I’m staying with your grandmama for a while. Your daddy did something without asking me, and we’re going to talk about it. That’s all. Nobody’s getting divorced.”

“What did he do?”

I thought about that for a long time. I didn’t want her to think less of her daddy.

But I didn’t want to lie to her either, because I had just seen what a lie does to a family.

“He paid off your grandmama’s house,” I said. “With our savings. Without asking me. She was about to lose it.”

Kaylee was quiet. Then she said, “Mama, that’s kind of a good thing and a bad thing at the same time.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what it is.”

Friday he had cereal again. Saturday, Kaylee reported, he tried to make a grilled cheese and set off the smoke alarm and ate cereal after all.

I tried not to enjoy that as much as I did.

I am not proud of it. But I had a slice of Faye’s pound cake that night with coffee, and I will admit I thought about those Frosted Flakes, and I smiled.

Those evenings at Faye’s were the strangest week of my married life, and some of the best. We had never spent more than a holiday afternoon alone together.