The Hymnal Ida Marked in Pencil

Sunday

On the twenty-fifth of October, a Sunday, the clock on the stove said six and I was at the burner with my back to the kitchen when I felt the floor move.

You feel a man’s boots through the boards, in a house you have lived in since 1976. I turned around. Alvah was standing four feet from me with his cup in his hand. He set the cup down.

And he signed to me.

I had watched him practice that for seven months through a bedroom window, at eighty feet. I had thought I was ready for it. I was not ready for it at four feet, in the light, with his face above his hands and his whole big careful body trembling. His hands were slow. They were clean. They made the shapes the book makes, as clean as a man’s hands can who drove a grader for thirty-four years. Good morning. Coffee. Sit with me.

I looked at his hands. I could not look at his face, because if I had I would have given everything away at once, the window, the glass humming, the book under the seat, all of it, in one look. So I watched his hands and held my face still. I turned the burner off, which I had forgotten I was doing. I rinsed my cup. I walked into the bedroom, and I shut the door, and I sat down on the bed with both hands over my mouth, and I stayed there an hour.

I could have signed it back. I knew “thank you,” I knew “coffee,” I knew “sit.” I had watched them two hundred times. My hands knew them the way a person’s hands know a hymn they have never sung.

But I did not, and I have thought hard about why. If I answered, my husband would stop being a man learning in secret and become a man in a conversation. And conversation is where I have been losing, in every room, for three years. I was frightened that the thing he had made for me would go the same way as everything else, and it would start to be a thing we did wrong together. I wanted one more morning of the present with the paper still on.

He signed it every morning and I watched. I watched his hands, and nodded once, and went about my work. I saw what it did to him, and I could not stop it. I was waiting until I knew what he most wanted to say to me, and I did not know yet.

On Thursday morning I stood at the window at five and watched him in the shed.

He did one sign over and over. A fist, held to his chest, going around in a circle. He did it in the mirror and he did it badly and he did it again. He did it three hundred times, I would guess, and I stood there with the cold coming off the glass and I did not need the book to know what it meant.

He was learning to say he was sorry.

I understood in the dark by that window what for. I do not mean the mudroom only. I mean the whole year. I mean the pneumonia he had not asked for and the voice he had lost and the Sundays he had let me stay home without once asking. He had stood behind a door at Easter and heard what he heard and said nothing, and he had been carrying that for seven months. Alvah Vanderhoef owes me nothing for a mudroom. He owes me nothing for a rasp. He owes me, God help him, less than any man alive. I wanted that sign taken off him before he got it right.

That was why Thursday. That is the whole of why.