The Deer Blind Where Our Bed Used to Be
And no using my stomach muscles to sit up or pull myself out of anything, because the muscles they cut through are the same ones you use to sit up, and they need time to knit.
“Roll to your side,” she said, “and push yourself up with your arms. And get yourself up off the floor, Holly. If your bed is low, you are going to hate your life.”
Our bed is low. Kyle built the frame himself the year we got married, out of two-by-tens, and it sits so close to the floor that our old cat used to have trouble getting under it.
The top of the mattress is not much more than a foot off the carpet.
Some mornings, healthy, I had to roll out of that bed onto my knees like a woman getting out of a canoe. I could not picture doing it with a row of staples across my stomach.
So I had gone looking. There was a furniture store on the highway outside Waterloo with a queen frame on clearance, tall enough to sit on with your feet flat on the floor.
With a mattress topper to make up the height, it came to six hundred dollars.
I had shown Kyle the picture on my phone two weeks before. He had glanced at it during the weather and said, “Yeah, we’ll figure it out.”
I had taken that as a yes, because for seventeen years of marriage that is usually what it meant.
I got down off the chair and put the can back. Then I went out to the garage and asked him, in my regular voice, where the bed was supposed to come from now.
“The rest has to stay for your hospital bill,” he said. He was pulling the blind’s carrying bag out of the carton, and it was the size of a duffel.
“You know that. They’re going to send us something big after the insurance.”
He was not wrong about that. Our deductible was going to eat most of the eighteen hundred, and probably more.
That was the part that made it so hard to argue with him. He had spent the bed money and then used the hospital bill to defend it.
“So where am I supposed to sleep?” I asked.
“Try the couch,” he said again, a little gentler this time, like he was solving it for me.
“It’s high enough. You can watch your shows. It’s what, a week? My buddy Jeff’s wife had hers done last spring and she was back at the café in five days.”
I could have explained it to him right there. I could have told him Jeff’s wife had the small kind and I was having the big kind, and that our couch is a sagging old sectional that swallows you to the hips.
I didn’t. I am not proud of that, but it is the truth.
People have asked me why I did not just go buy the bed myself. The answer is simple and it is not very interesting.
I was going on short-term disability for six weeks at sixty percent of my pay, and there was not six hundred spare dollars in my checking account.
I could have put it on a credit card.
But I was not going to start six weeks of healing by paying interest on something my husband had already promised me, and I was too tired that night to fight for something I had already asked for once.