The Deer Blind Where Our Bed Used to Be
“Try the couch, Hol.” Kyle said it from the open garage door with a box cutter in his hand, already slitting the tape on a carton taller than I am. He didn’t look up. He was smiling at the box.
I stood on the step into the kitchen in my bank clothes, my name tag still pinned to my cardigan.
It was a Tuesday in the middle of October, nine days before my surgery, and the garage smelled like cardboard and cold concrete.
The picture on the side of the carton showed a camouflage hunting blind big enough for four men to sit in with their elbows out.
Next to it were two smaller boxes, a propane heater and a pair of padded swivel chairs, and leaning on the wall was a steel stand to lift the whole thing off the ground.
“How much?” I asked. I already knew the answer was going to be more than I wanted to hear, because Kyle only smiles at a purchase like that when he has talked himself into it on the drive home.
“Three thousand,” he said. “With tax. Fleet Farm had the stand on sale, so really I saved about two hundred.” He finally looked at me. “You should see the windows on this thing, Hol. They’re silent. No zippers.”
I didn’t say anything. I went back inside and opened the cupboard over the refrigerator, where we keep the coffee can, and I counted what was left in it standing on a kitchen chair.
We had started that can two summers ago. Fifty dollars a week, sometimes a hundred when Kyle picked up a Saturday haul.
We called it the put-back money, because that is what my grandmother called anything you were not allowed to touch.
There had been four thousand eight hundred dollars in it on Sunday. Now there was eighteen hundred, and a receipt from Fleet Farm folded around the bills like a little blanket.
I want to be fair about what came next, because I have told this story enough times now to know people want Kyle to be a villain, and he isn’t one.
He is a man who has hauled feed for the co-op for nineteen years and never once missed a load.
But I also want to be honest about how it felt standing on that chair. It felt like I had been put on a scale next to a deer, and the deer had won.
My surgery had been on the calendar since August.
I had fibroids, a lot of them, and they had been making my life miserable for three years before I finally let my doctor talk me into doing something permanent about it.
Because of how big they had gotten, it was not going to be the small kind of hysterectomy where they go in through a few little cuts and you are home by supper.
Mine was going to be the old-fashioned kind, a real incision, two nights in the hospital in Waterloo, and six weeks of taking it easy.
My doctor was a plain-spoken woman about my age with reading glasses on a beaded chain.
At my last appointment she had held up one finger at a time and given me the rules, the way I give a new teller the rules about the vault.
No lifting anything heavier than a gallon of milk. No vacuuming. No driving for two weeks.