I did not tell him. This is what I have turned over for a year. I could not tell him that the one thing in church I still had was the thing he had lost, because I would have been handing a man who was nine days out of a hospital bed one more thing to feel guilty for, like a bill at the door. And I could not tell him how much I had lost already, because I had spent two years making sure nobody knew.
In September I stopped going. I told him my hip. My hip has been fine since 1998. I keep a bad hip the way some women keep the good china, for occasions. The truth is that I could sit through a sermon I could not hear. I had done it for two years. I could not sit in pew four through a hymn with that hole in it, with my husband’s mouth moving and nothing coming up through the floor.
So I stayed home on Sundays and sat in my kitchen and let him think it was the sermon. It was easier for him to believe I could not hear the pastor than to believe I could no longer hear him.
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The Mudroom
I went back for Easter because Piper was singing. She is eleven. She had a solo, four lines of a hymn I could not hear one note of, and I sat in pew four with my granddaughter’s mouth moving at the front of the church and watched it with my whole face, the way you watch a deer at the edge of the woods so as not to frighten it. She looked for me when she was done. I nodded. She did not know I had not heard her. That is the thing I am best at.
We went to Cordell and Rhonda’s for dinner. They have a good house on the north side of town with a front room that opens onto a hall and a mudroom beyond it, and I sat in the front room in the armchair by the window with a plate of ham on my knees. From that chair, if the hall door is open, you can see about a third of the mudroom through a mirror Rhonda hung on the opposite wall. I do not think she knows.
Alvah went to get our coats. Rhonda was in there with Cordell, folding grocery sacks into a drawer.
I was not looking at them. I will say that plainly. I was looking at the ham. But a woman who has spent two years reading lips is a woman whose eyes go to a moving mouth the way a dog’s ears go to a gate, and the mirror was right there. I saw the side of Rhonda’s face, and the words came to me as clear as print.
“She can’t follow anything anymore, Cordell. Why bother taking her to church?”