The Deer Blind Where Our Bed Used to Be
I let us in the back door. The kitchen was clean, cleaner than I keep it.
There was a single plate in the drying rack, a single fork, a single cup. I don’t know why that got to me, but it did.
They had our bed apart in twenty minutes. Mattress and box spring up on their sides against the wall first, then the frame.
Kyle had built that frame with lag screws, and Rusty backed every one of them out with his impact driver and dropped them in a coffee mug so not a one would get lost.
“Where do you want the rails?” Dale asked me.
“Garage,” I said. “Against the back wall, by the freezer. Stack them flat so they don’t warp.”
Then Dale went to the corner of the garage, where the big carrying bag was still sitting with the tags on it, and picked it up by both handles.
“Heavier than it looks,” he said, grunting. “That’s quality.”
It was dark by then, a little after six.
The yard light glowed orange in our bedroom window, and the lamp on the dresser lit the beige carpet, the way it does at the end of October when the days get short.
The room was empty except for the dresser and the window. I had never seen it empty before.
Without the bed in it, our bedroom looked bigger than I remembered, and a little sad, like a house that had been sold.
Dale was in his black-and-red buffalo plaid jacket, the same one he has worn every fall since about 2010.
Rusty had on a gray hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up. They each took a side of that camouflage blind and started pulling it open.
It snapped open in the middle of our bedroom with a sound like a gunshot. Rusty rocked back on his heels. Dale said, “Whoa,” and then said, “Well, I’ll be.”
It took up half the room, brown and green and gray, with those silent windows Kyle had been so proud of. It was exactly where our bed had been.
I was standing in the doorway in my pink robe, with one hand on the door frame because I needed the help, and I was laughing.
Not a polite laugh. The kind of laugh you have not had in months, that comes all the way up from your feet.
It hurt. It hurt a lot, and I did not care one bit.
“Hol,” Rusty said, “you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’m fine. It’s just so big.”
Dale set the two swivel chairs inside, facing the window, and Rusty put a folded blanket on each one.
Then Dale stood back and looked at it with his hands on his hips, like a man who has just finished a deck.
“Something’s missing,” he said.
He went out to the kitchen and came back with a pad of my sticky notes and a pen.
He wrote something on one and stuck it to the flap of the blind door, and then stepped aside so I could read it.
It said: Try the couch.
In the end I left it. I told myself it was because it was true. I think it was also because I was still standing on that kitchen chair in my head, counting eighteen hundred dollars.
The heater stayed in its box in the garage. Dale double-checked that the back door was locked.