The Kitchen
We had pork chops. I put them on the table at a quarter to six, with the fried potatoes, and I ate what I could, and I did not taste any of it. When we were finished I took his plate, which I never let him do, because I wanted something in my hands.
I heard him sit there while I washed up, and by that I mean I felt it. A man alone at a table makes a certain stillness in a kitchen. When the last plate was in the rack I dried my hands, and I did not go to him. I went to the bedroom.
I looked at myself in the dresser mirror, an old woman in a blue cardigan holding a book, and I thought, Ida, you have been brave about worse. Then I walked down the hall.
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He was where I left him, at the oilcloth, with his cup between his big hands and his eyes on the salt. He is not a man who knows what to do with his face when he is waiting. It goes very still, and his ears turn red at the tips, the way they did in 1973.
I set the hymnal down between his cup and the salt. It was open to the page I had marked with a bulletin, the wedding hymn, “Now Thank We All Our God,” with the line of pencil under every bass note from the first measure to the last.
I watched him read it. I watched him see the pencil. I watched him turn one page, and the next, and the next, and I knew the exact moment he understood that it went on, because his shoulders came up and then, slowly, they came down.
His face does not move when he is moved, but it opens, like a house when someone finally lights the back room.
He looked up.
I stood at his elbow with one hand on the back of his chair. And I did what I had decided in the bedroom I would do. I put two fingers against my own throat, at the place where a voice lives, and I felt my pulse going there like a bird. Then I reached out and I put the same two fingers against his.