The Name He Wrote on the Line

I had not known he heard. I had to sit down on the edge of the chair.

Brian stood there a while longer. Then he said, “Okay.” His voice cracked on it, the way a boy’s voice cracks. “Okay, Dad. I’ll let you rest.”

He turned and walked out of the room. He did not slam the door. He did not look back.

He left his folder on the foot of the bed.

Kim zipped her bag. She gave Ron the signed original and told him to keep it somewhere safe, and then she stopped beside me on her way to the door and put her hand on my shoulder for just a second, and went out.

“Let him go, Debbie,” Ron said, when I looked at the door. “He’ll be back. He’s mine. He’s just got to walk it off.”

I put the signed original in my purse. Then I picked up Brian’s folder, with his spare copy still inside it, and slid it into my tote bag.

I did not know what I would do with it. I only knew I was not going to throw it away.

Then I sat down by my husband and held his hand until he fell asleep, and the heart monitor kept its little green line, and the light went from white to gold to gray outside the window.

They sent Ron home on Monday.

The first two weeks were the hardest of our marriage. He could not lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk. He could not drive.

He slept in the recliner because lying flat hurt his chest, and I slept on the couch beside him so I would hear him if he needed me.

My left hand was not a problem. I want to say that for anybody who has ever been told they were too weak to take care of someone.

I learned to help him up from the recliner with my right arm and my hip, and we never once fell.

A home health nurse came out twice a week from Vinita. Our neighbor Dale plowed the driveway when we got that ice the second week, and his wife brought chicken and noodles, and the ladies from church kept us in casseroles until I had to start freezing them.

At the end of the second week, the swelling in Ron’s hands went down. One morning at the kitchen table he held his left hand up to the window and made a fist, and his knuckles showed again.

I unhooked the chain from around my neck. I slid the ring off it, and I took his hand, and I put his wedding band back on his finger the same way I had put it on him nine years before in front of the whole congregation.

He looked at it for a while. “There,” he said. “Now I’m dressed.”

Brian did not call that week, or the next. Ron did not call him either. I asked Ron once if he wanted me to, and he said, “No. This one’s mine to do. Give it a little time.”

In the middle of March, on a Sunday afternoon when the wind had finally laid down and the redbuds along the fence row were just starting to think about it, Ron picked up the phone in the kitchen.