The Deer Blind Where Our Bed Used to Be
Then they walked me back out to the truck, one on each side, and Dale drove ten miles back to Mama’s at four miles an hour.
My mother had a plate of chicken and noodles waiting. My father was in his recliner pretending to watch the news. When I came in on my brothers’ arms, he looked at the three of us over his glasses.
“Well?” he said.
“It fit,” Dale said.
My father shook his head and went back to the news.
But I saw the corner of his mouth go up, and I saw him wipe his eye with the side of his thumb, and I don’t think it was from laughing.
I ate half a plate of noodles, which was the most I had eaten since the hospital.
Then I went to the spare room, put my feet on my father’s step, took hold of the rail, and climbed into my grandmother’s bed.
I did not sleep. I lay there listening to the furnace and the wind in the cottonwoods, watching the clock on the nightstand.
At ten fifteen I heard a truck on the gravel road and held my breath, but it was just the neighbor coming home from town.
At ten forty-one my phone lit up on the nightstand.
Kyle.
I let it ring twice. Then I answered it, and I didn’t say anything, and for a while neither did he.
I could hear our house around him. The furnace in our hallway has a rattle at the start of every cycle, and I heard it kick on.
I could tell exactly where he was standing. He was in our bedroom doorway, right where I had stood four hours before.
“Hol,” he said finally.
“I’m here.”
“They set it up backwards,” he said. “The shooting windows are facing the closet. If a deer comes in through the closet, I’m in great shape.”
I laughed before I could stop myself, and it hurt, and I said “Ow,” and he said, “You okay?” in a different voice altogether, a fast scared voice I had not heard from him in a long time.
“I’m okay,” I said. “It just hurts to laugh.”
He was quiet again. I heard him breathe out, long and slow.
“I read the note,” he said. Then he said, “I deserved that.”
We talked for almost an hour that night. Not about the blind, not really. He asked me why it hurt to laugh, and I told him.
It was the first time he had ever asked me a single question about the surgery.
He did not know it had been the big kind. He thought it was the kind Jeff’s wife had.
When I told him about the incision, and the muscles, and the rule about not sitting up with my stomach, he went so quiet I thought the call had dropped.
“I told you to sleep on that couch,” he said at last. “That couch. Holly, I can barely get out of that couch.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
That was the fair question, and I gave him the honest answer. “I tried once,” I said. “I showed you the bed. And then you bought the blind, and I didn’t have it in me to ask twice.”
“Are you putting the bed back together?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “I’m going to sleep in my blind.”
He did, too. For two nights.