“Gary, take a deep breath,” I said, and I heard the hockey game go quiet in the lodge behind him. “Open the duffel bag all the way. Everything I put in there, I put in there with love.” I was sitting in my recliner with the walker in front of me and an ice pack strapped to my knee. The night before, it had taken me twenty minutes to get down to the basement, and I had sat on the cold concrete beside the furnace for a long time before I opened that zipper. I had taken out his fishing shirts, his waders and his lucky hat. In their place, I had packed my recovery.
Gary found my knee brace on top, the big gray one with the Velcro straps. Under it were three frozen gel packs wrapped in dish towels, a pill organizer filled for seven days, and a printed schedule that began with the words, Every four hours, day and night, set an alarm. There was also a long strip of paper, the kind from an adding machine, on which I had written every single thing I could not do for myself that month. It reached the floor. At the bottom, I had written, Welcome home, hon. I will be waiting. Slowly. With a walker.
I heard the VFW men laughing, and then I heard one of them stop. “Gary, what is that?” one of them asked, and another said, “Is that the handwriting of your wife?” Gary did not answer. When he finally spoke, all the bluster had left his voice. “Marlene,” he said, “I was only going for a week.” “I know, hon,” I said. “And I was only learning to walk again. We were both only doing what we were doing. But you were doing it with nobody to lift you off a toilet. I was doing it with a towel bar bent in half.”
A green duffel opened in a fishing lodge gave one husband the weekend to bring his wife back to the recliner in Grand Rapids.
He flew home from Ketchikan the next morning, through Seattle and Chicago, a day and a half of airports with a bag that no longer held his fishing gear. My sister, Janet, picked him up in Grand Rapids. She told me later that he did not say a word the whole drive, and that he carried the empty duffel on his lap like a man carrying his own mistake. He came through the kitchen door at dusk, set the bag down, and knelt beside my recliner on both knees. He had not knelt since our wedding. His knees cracked like twigs.
I gave him my terms over supper, on trays, since I could not yet sit at the table. He would take me to every therapy appointment, and he would do the exercises beside me, every morning and every evening, with the same number of repetitions. He would move back into our bedroom, and he would help me in and out of the shower. The sixty eight hundred dollars was spent, and it would be repaid to our savings from the sale of his boat. And on the day that I walked to the mailbox alone, he would carry me a chair and sit there with me. He agreed to all of it, and he wept.
On Sunday, our whole church came by after the service, as they had the week before. Pastor Dan brought a ham. The bowling league sent a card with forty signatures, and one of the women, Bev, sat beside me on the couch and said, in her plain way, “Marlene, we were all talking, and we think Gary should know that every one of us would have stayed.” Gary was standing in the doorway with the iced tea, and he heard it. He did not defend himself. He only said, “They are right,” and he set the tea down on the table in front of me.
The money consequences were not small. The lodge kept the deposit. Gary sold his boat, the sixteen foot Lund that had sat in our garage for eleven summers, and with the money he paid back the savings account in full. His buddies at the VFW teased him for a month, and then one of them, Walt, had a hip replaced and came to our house to ask how I had done it. Gary sat with Walt for an hour and told him all about the ice packs, the alarms and the schedule. I listened from my recliner, and I could not stop smiling.
My mother, Edith, passed nine years ago, and she was the kind of woman who drove soup to every neighbor with a cast or a cough. In her name, I started the Edith Fund. It pays for rides, meals and a home helper for people in Kent County who come home from knee or hip surgery with no one to lift them. In the first month, we helped twenty three people. A retired bus driver of eighty, living alone, called me on the phone just to say, “Nobody has ever come to my door with a hot supper.”
By Easter, I was walking without the walker. On the day I made it to the mailbox alone, thirty six steps there and thirty six back, I looked up and saw Gary sitting at the end of the driveway on a folding chair, with a thermos of coffee and a second chair beside it. He had promised, and he had kept his word. I eased into the chair, and we sat side by side in the spring sunshine, saying nothing, while a robin hopped across the lawn. It was the finest morning of my life.
In June, we went to Ketchikan. We booked it ourselves, the two of us, a week in a little cabin with a view of the water, and Gary carried both bags. I brought my own cane, and he brought his fishing pole. On the first morning, he caught a king salmon off the dock and held it up in the sun, laughing like a boy. Then he did something I had waited thirty eight years to see. He put down the pole, took my hand, and said, “Hon, today I do not want to fish. I want to sit with you.”
