The Call My Husband Never Ended

I was doing fifty on Route KK with the windows cracked and the radio off when my husband forgot to hang up the phone, and by the time I found a wide spot on the shoulder to stop the car, there was no marriage left worth saving. I just did not know it yet, not all the way. I only knew my hands would not stop shaking.

It happened on a Tuesday, the kind of ordinary Tuesday that Sweet Springs, Missouri runs on. I had spent the afternoon at my mother’s place two counties over, helping her can the last of the tomatoes before frost, and I called Merlin from the gravel turnout by the old grain elevator to tell him I was heading home early. He picked up sounding rushed, the way he always sounded when he wanted me to think he was buried in work at the bank. He told me he loved me. He said he was wrapping up a few things and would see me at the house.

Then he thought he hung up.

He hadn’t.

The line stayed open, and for a few seconds there was nothing but road noise and the tick of my turn signal. Then his voice came through the speaker, closer than it should have been, lower than the voice he used on me.

“Lord, she wears me out,” he said.

I did not recognize the tone. I recognized the voice.

Then a woman laughed, soft and familiar, a laugh I had heard across my own kitchen table more Sunday mornings than I could count.

“Don’t talk about her like that,” the woman said, half teasing. “I don’t want our son growing up confused about who his real family is.”

Nolabelle.

My best friend since the third grade at Sweet Springs Elementary. The woman who sat across from me at quilting circle every other Thursday. The woman who had held my hand in a hospital hallway in Marshall the night of my second miscarriage and told me God was not finished with me yet.