The Card My Husband Left Me

I refused my husband’s goodbye card for six years until a bank teller told me what he never could

For six years I kept a card I never opened all the way, tucked flat inside the family Bible between Psalms and Proverbs, and for six years I told myself I was leaving it there out of principle. That is the first lie I need to confess to you. It was not principle. It was pride, and under the pride it was a hurt so deep I could not look straight at it, the way you cannot look straight at the sun even when you know it is the only thing keeping the whole field alive.

My name is Ellen. I am sixty-three years old. I have lived my whole life inside the same thirty mile circle of wheat country out past Verdon, Kansas, a town so small the grain elevator is taller than the water tower and the two of them are the only things you can see from the county road before you ever see a house. I married Harlan Teague when I was twenty-four and he was twenty-six, in the little white Methodist church on Second Street, and we were married thirty-seven years. I want you to hold that number. Thirty-seven years. A person builds a whole life in thirty-seven years. You build it so slow and so steady you forget you are building anything at all, and then one autumn it is just there, finished, the two of you standing inside it like a house you did not remember raising.

And then one October, with no warning I could name, Harlan took it apart.

I have gone over that fall a thousand times. I have laid it out on the kitchen table like a hand of cards and studied it until my eyes hurt. He got quiet first. Harlan was never a loud man, but there is a quiet that is peace and a quiet that is a door closing, and his was the second kind. He stopped eating much. He started sleeping in the back room, said his back was bad, and I believed him because why would I not. He went to town more. He stayed out at the scale house at the Co-op later than the job needed him to. He let go of my hand in church during the long prayer, which he had held every Sunday for thirty-seven years, and when I looked over he was staring at the hymnal like it had the answer to something in it.

By November he had rented a room above the hardware store in town and moved into it with two duffel bags and his father’s old Bible and left me the farm, the dog, and a card.

I want to tell you about the card, because the card is where this whole thing lives.

It was a cheap one. That was the part that cut me worst, if I am honest. Not a letter. Not thirty-seven years of words. A drugstore card with a watercolor of a sunrise on the front and inside, in his cramped pencil hand that I would know anywhere, four words. “For you. Be well.” And folded into the crease, three thousand dollars in hundreds, crisp, counted, the kind of money we never had lying around on a wheat farm where every dollar had a job before it ever came in the door.