The Name Tattooed On Her Arm

I have been married to Marlene for thirty-one years, and in all that time I never once had a reason to go through her phone. I want you to understand that before I tell you the rest. I was not the kind of husband who checked. I trusted her the way you trust the floor under your feet, without ever thinking about it. That is what made the week I am about to describe feel like the ground opening up.

We live in Harmon, a town in southern Indiana small enough that the grocery closes at eight and the whole place smells like cut hay in September. I run the hardware store on Main, the one my father ran before me, the one with the wood floor that squeaks in the same three spots it squeaked when I was a boy. Marlene keeps the books for the store and works two days a week at the flower shop next to the bank. We raised two kids in a white house on Sumner Street with a porch that needs painting every couple of years whether I get to it or not. That is our life. It is a good one. I never wanted a bigger one.

So when Marlene told me in July that her old high school friends were planning a girls’ trip, four days in Branson, and asked in this careful voice whether I would mind if she went, I did not even let her finish.

“Go,” I said. “You have not done a thing for yourself in years. Go.”

The trip I was glad she took

She had been worn thin for months, and I had noticed it the way you notice weather changing. Marlene has always been the one who holds everything together, the one who remembers the birthdays and the casserole dishes that need returning and which of the grandkids is scared of the dark. But that spring she had gone quiet in a way I could not name. She would stand at the sink with the water running and stare out the window at nothing. Once I found her sitting in the car in the driveway with the engine off, just sitting, and when I tapped the glass she jumped like I had caught her at something.

I chalked it up to the change, to age, to the long gray tail end of a hard winter. I told myself a few days with Deb and Sharon and Patty, women she had known since they were girls with feathered hair and homemade dresses, would put the color back in her.

Patty picked her up on a Thursday morning in that big maroon Buick of hers. I carried Marlene’s bag out to the car and set it in the trunk between a cooler and Sharon’s overnight case, and I kissed my wife on the cheek and told her to have fun and not to worry about the store. She held onto my arm a second longer than usual before she got in. I remember that. At the time I thought it was sweet. Later I understood it was something closer to an apology she had not figured out how to say.

They drove down through the hills to Branson, and for four days I ate cold cereal for supper and watched too much television and missed her in the ordinary way you miss a person you have shared a bed with for three decades. She called each night. She sounded happy. She sounded, I thought, more like herself than she had in a long time, laughing at something Deb said, telling me about a show they saw and a catfish place they found off the highway.

“I’m glad you went,” I told her Saturday night.

There was a pause on the line. “Gary,” she said, and then nothing.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I just love you. I’ll see you Sunday.”