The Sack Breakfast in the Bread Box

“How’s the empire?” I’d say, when she counted the bills out on the table. “Forty hens and you still can’t buy a tank of gas.”

She always laughed. I thought she thought it was funny.

Jen’s left knee had been going for three years. By this fall she could not do the church stairs without holding the rail with both hands, and she had stopped kneeling at communion and started standing at the end of the rail instead.

The surgeon in Mankato did the replacement on a Monday. The nurse told me she would be three nights there, then move to the swing bed at our hospital in town for a week of therapy before she came home.

Monday night she was groggy and sick from the anesthesia. I sat by her bed until the nurse sent me home. Jen held my hand and drifted off and woke up and asked me the same thing twice.

“Did you fill the box?” she said.

“Don’t worry about the box,” I told her.

“Wade.”

“It’s handled,” I said. That was not a lie, exactly. I had handled it in my head already. I was going to end it while she slept off the morphine.

I drove the thirty miles home thinking I was doing her a favor. Two years of getting up at quarter to five in the cold, for some fellow who never even waved. Somebody had to put a stop to it, and she was too soft to do it herself.

That is what I told myself. Then a boy apologized to me in the dark, and I spent all of Tuesday up in a bucket truck on the west line, changing out crossarms and thinking about his jacket.

I set my alarm for 4:30 Wednesday morning. I told myself it was just until Jen got home. I told myself I would sort it out with her properly once she was on her feet.

I am not a cook. Jen has done the cooking in our house for twenty-eight years, and before that my mother did it. I got the cast iron too hot, and the two eggs I fried came out brown and stiff at the edges.

I put them between two slices of toast anyway, with a slice of the ham I had offered him the day before. I added an apple from the bowl and a carton of milk from the stack Jen keeps in the refrigerator door, which I had never once wondered about.

I found the paper sacks in the drawer by the stove. Jen had a whole stack of them, folded neat. I put the food in, rolled the top down twice, and stood there not knowing whether a man was supposed to write something on it.

I did not write anything. I walked it down the lane at five and set it in the bread box and closed the lid, and then I went back and stood on the porch with the light off like a fool, watching.

At ten after five he came out of the dark. He opened the lid, stood a second looking at the sack, and then looked up toward the house. I do not think he could see me. He nodded at the porch anyway.