The Hymnal Ida Marked in Pencil

He went into the shed with it. I did not find out what it was until Wednesday, when he went to the Co-op for coffee with the men and I walked out to the truck in my slippers and looked under the seat. There it was. A fat paperback with a cracked spine and a checkout card stamped eleven times in 2003.

I turned to the page his thumb had worn. It was the first sign in the book that a man needs. THANK YOU.

I put it back exactly the way I had found it, spine toward the door, and I went inside and sat down at the kitchen table and put both hands over my mouth.

Let me tell you what I did next, because I have asked myself. I did nothing. I did not go to him. I did not say, “Alvah, I know.” I want to explain this because I do not think it was cowardice, or not all of it. It was something I learned young from my mother, who learned it from hers. When a man is making you something in secret, he is wrapping a present, and you do not tear the paper.

And there was a second reason, and it is the one I am less proud of. For three years every person who loved me had met my deafness by getting louder. Louder, and slower, and closer, and brighter, and then at last quieter, because they could see I was a burden to them and a closed door. My husband had gone off before dawn in the dark and put his hands in front of a mirror to learn how to reach me. He was not raising his voice. He had gone around the whole problem of my ears and decided to come at me by another road.

So I watched. For two hundred and twelve days, most mornings, I woke at five when the bed went cold, and I stood at the bedroom window in my robe with the curtain held back an inch, and I watched my husband make shapes with his hands in front of a shaving mirror wired to a roof post. I watched him do “thank you” and “coffee.” I watched the ring finger that has not bent since the grader chain take the top off it in 1983, standing up out of his fist like a man volunteering at a meeting, and I laughed at the window alone, and covered my mouth.

I watched him lose. I will tell you this because he did not. One morning in August he was in there two hours and made nothing, and sat down finally on an upturned bucket with his hands hanging between his knees, and then got up and drove into town. I stood at that window with my forehead against the glass. Everything in me wanted to go out in my robe and my slippers and say, “Alvah, you do not have to.” And I did not, because it was his to finish. He finished it. I have never been prouder of anyone in my life than I was of a man on a bucket.