His throat was warm. I could feel his breath going in and out under my fingers, and under it, very faint, a hum. He did not know he was doing it. He was humming. My husband was sitting at our kitchen table with a hymnal in front of him and tears standing in his eyes, humming one low note, and I could feel it with my fingertips as plain as a man’s voice across a field.
Then I made the sign.
I had practiced only that one. I want you to know that. On a Wednesday morning in June, when he was in town at the Co-op, I went out and found the book under the truck seat again and carried it into the bathroom and shut the door, and I turned to the page with the worn corner, the page where his thumb always went, and I looked up what I wanted to say. It took me an hour and a half to get it right, in the bathroom mirror, with my left hand, because my right shakes. I practiced it for five months while he practiced a hundred others. Fifty-two years and we had the same idea at the same time, in two rooms, with the doors shut.
I held my left hand out the way the picture shows, and moved it. It is not a hard sign. It is a hand that sways like a branch, over an arm held steady like a staff. I did it a little wrong. I was crying by then and I did it wrong, and he watched my hands the way I had watched his, and he knew.
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“Alvah,” I said out loud. I can still say a man’s name. “Sing.”
“I can hear you,” I said. “I never stopped. You were the last thing to go, and you are the only thing that stayed. I could feel you in that pew every Sunday for fifty-one years, and I have been sitting at this table for five months with a pencil in my hand trying to find where you went. You did not lose your voice. You lost your audience. Sing to me. It is gravel and it is mine and I would know it in a hurricane.”
My husband looked at me for a very long time. I counted. It was ten seconds. I do not mind saying I counted every one, and I did not breathe for any of them.
Then he put his big hand over mine on his throat, and he opened his mouth, and what came out was the first line of the wedding hymn, in a voice like a road under frost, cracked on the second word and holding on the third, and I felt every note of it come up through the table into the heel of my other hand and run up my arm and settle in the middle of my chest, where it had been missing for nineteen months.
The pencil line under every note, all the way down, was the only map I had of where he was. Now I did not need it. I could follow him anywhere.