The Story Hour In My Front Room

I was married to Harold for thirty-one years. We wanted them. I will leave it there, because this is not a story about a hospital hallway, and because I have learned that the people who need you to describe that hallway are usually the ones who will not sit with you in it.

We tried. It did not happen. Harold used to say God gave us the whole town’s worth instead, and I used to tell him that was a sweet thing to say and also a thing men say when they do not know what else to say, and he would laugh because it was true.

Harold passed four years ago, in February, which is the worst month to bury a man because the ground fights you.

So when Darla said you don’t really know, not the way a mother does, she did not know that she had reached into a drawer I keep shut and pulled the thing out and set it on the table between the coffee cups. She did not know. That is important to how this ends, so hold onto it.

But she said it. And I drove home with a forty dollar gift card in the cup holder, and I sat in my truck in my own driveway for a while, and then I went inside and I put the kettle on.

Faye comes over

My neighbor Faye saw my truck come in early and walked over, because that is what Faye does. She has lived across the road from me for nineteen years and she can read my truck the way other people read a face.

“You’re home from church cleanup awful early,” she said, letting herself in the back. She stopped when she saw me at the table. “What happened.”

I told her. I told it flat, the way you tell a thing when you are still deciding how you feel about it.

Faye is seventy-one and she does not have my restraint. She set her hands on my table.

“She did not,” Faye said.

“She did.”

“Forty dollars.”

“There’s a coffee cup on it.”

Faye picked up the card and turned it over like it might have more to say on the back. “I have a mind to go up there.”

“You will not go up there.”

“Pastor Enright know about this?”

“I don’t believe he does.” Gary Enright had been our preacher since spring, a quiet man, good from the pulpit, still learning the names. Darla was his wife. I did not think he had sent her with a gift card. I thought this was hers.

Faye sat down. She is not a crier either, the two of us, but she reached over and put her hand on my wrist, which from Faye is the same as weeping.

“Bonnie,” she said. “You taught half this county its Bible verses on that little rug. My Kayla learned ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ sitting in your lap.”

“I remember.”

“So what are you going to do.”

And that was the question. I looked out my kitchen window at my front room, which you could see into from where I sat, the worn green sofa and Harold’s chair and the braided rug my mother made the winter I was born, and I did not have an answer yet. But I had the start of one.