Sometimes You Forget

Feb 1, 2016 | Southern Lit

[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell”][/title]

I wake alone this morning, my husband Gabe already off to work, his note on my nightstand telling me so. Gabe works as a dispatcher at Haul Y’all Trucking, and someone called in sick, so he left our bed while I was dreaming of my old boyfriend. In my dream I was saying, “I do love you. I’ll always love you. I just can’t be with you anymore.”

 

Which is almost an exact transcription of our actual breakup almost four years ago.

 

I am tangled in the bedclothes now, the blue sheets and the white comforter, and when I get up our two schnauzers are waiting for me, their stub tails wagging like tiny windshield wipers.

 

Outside, the chickens wait. Ulysses, Gilead, Velta, Madge and Honey. They call to me from inside their house, anxious little birds, and when I open their miniature door and they stumble down the walkway that leads to their freedom, they look like drunken pirates on a gangplank.

 

The sky has gone pink, off to the west, and hawks are in the hayfield that adjoins our yard, swooping so low they cast a shadow over me. I used to love the hawks, before I got chicks, and now I only think: chicken killer, chicken killer, chicken killer.

 

There is a rhythm to mornings that I love. I feed the dogs. I feed the chickens. And then I make tea and toast. But this morning, the dream is troubling me. The man I broke up with, his name was Roman. He was a head taller than me. He had gray eyes. He had this mouth, well, you’d just have to see it.

 

He used to cook for me on Friday nights, complicated dishes that took thought and planning, and he’d pour wine for me, and he played Schubert from an old record player he’d restored bit by bit. He hummed while he cooked.

 

Roman had a way about him, a kind of introspection that made you stop and look at your own life.  And when I looked at mine, it seemed lacking, and so for a while I tried to change. I read what he read, dusty books from used bookstores. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance stands out. The Will to Doubt. The Sot-Weed Factor.

 

We went to piano bars. We listened to NPR. Even on hikes, he’d teach me the names of flowers, tell me the complicated history of Arkansas, question me about my politics. I felt like I was in training for something grand. We came this close to making it last. But love is not a classroom. And even if it were, I am a poor student. He had this way of looking at me, if I ordered beer at dinner, for example. If I did, he would blink hard and smile at the waiter as if he needed to apologize. I started to feel camouflaged when I was with him. Or maybe invisible. It took its toll.

 

When I broke up with Roman, I had to take off the engagement ring he’d given me, the biggest diamond I had ever owned. I slipped it into his hand, and he would not close his fingers around it. He looked astounded, his forehead creased, his black hair shiny as he shook his head in disbelief. He was the far better catch than I would ever be, and I think we both knew it.

 

There are whole days when I don’t think about him. Some nights, though, as my husband sleeps, I imagine what it would be like to have two lives. One in the here and now, sitting as I am on the porch swing as the chickens run by, wondering what my husband is doing at this very moment. And one where I know how to pair wine with food, where I’d been to Paris, where I knew enough to surprise Roman a time or two.

 

This is not fair to my husband. I think we can all agree.

 

The phone is ringing, and so I rise to get it. My husband is calling to make sure I let the chickens out. “Sometimes you forget,” he says, and I think how my problem is the opposite of forgetting.

 

What makes a good wife good? My husband’s clothes are clean. Supper’s on the table at six o’clock sharp every evening. I let him go hunting all he wants. Last night, he said, “You know what hillbillies call a seven-course meal?” And when I said no, he slapped his knee and said, “A six pack of Bud and a possum,” and I laughed like I meant it.

 

Well, maybe I did.

 

I am making pork tenderloin tonight. I am making deviled eggs and vegetable whip, a recipe my mother-in-law gave me when Gabe and I got married. Carrots, potatoes, onion, an apple. In the kitchen, our dogs, Sugar Baby and Mr. Wigglesworth, are begging for treats, their bodies jiggly with excitement. I get out two milk bones and make them shake and then roll over before I dole them out.

 

There are candles in the cabinet above the sink, and I am standing on a stool trying to reach them. The thought of candlelight came to me in a flash, a kind of penance for my divided heart, and I open the doors and rummage until I find them. In the cabinet is also a black notebook, plain as notebooks go, but one I’ve never seen until now. I take it down and sit at the kitchen table as I leaf through the pages.

 

It is filled with my husband’s lists. Things like the names of paint colors we’ve used on walls, estimates for the sun porch we’ve been talking about building, dates he’s changed the oil in my car. There is a tab sticking out, and on it he’s written “2016 Goals.” I flip the page. He wants to save a thousand dollars this year, get a new crossbow, and visit his mother more. There are steps to each goal, even the visits to his mom. (Take her to lunch every payday.) I turn the page again, and then I read, “Make Jeannie happy.” There are no steps listed. Just a question mark.

 

I close the book. The day he asked me to marry him, he didn’t have a ring. “I want you to get what you want,” he said, after I’d said yes. That night we went to the mall, and he was holding my hand so tight it hurt. He was smiling like a kid does. That open smile that sees nothing but good coming down the road, even when the road twists and turns so much you can’t see the end of it.

 

The timer on the oven sounds, a sharp beep that makes me jump. I shut it off, and then I sit at the table. In thirty minutes or so, Gabe will be home. My White Sultan chicken, Madge, climbs up on the deck and cranes her neck to look through the low window. Gabe drove all the way to Blue Eye, Missouri, to buy me that girl.

 

When Gabe pulls up, I run outside to meet him. He gets out of his pickup, and I put my hands around his waist. “What’s going on?” he asks. And I say, “Can’t a woman love her husband without being questioned?”

 

He smiles then, not quite as big as he did on the day he proposed, but close enough. Later, after things happen that cannot be described here, we are back in the kitchen, hungry again, and so we eat, side by side and holding hands, like two people who know what a good thing is when they’ve got it. Which, I believe I can say with some authority, is the primary key to happiness.

 

Do South Magazine

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