The garage door was standing wide open.
A radio was playing somewhere inside. George Strait, low and scratchy. The whole place smelled like fresh cut pine and paint.
I stood at the edge of the gravel drive in my good shoes and my good blouse, the one with the little blue buttons, and I couldn’t make my feet go any farther.
My son had told me what I would find out here. A wife, maybe. A girlfriend. A man with something to hide, who wanted his hands on my dead husband’s insurance money.
I’d driven forty minutes on back roads to prove him wrong. Or to prove him right. By then I honestly didn’t know which one I was more afraid of.
Then I looked into that garage, and I saw the ramp.
Long and wide, built of brand new lumber, so new the wood was still pale and sticky with sap. It ran from the concrete floor of the garage all the way up to the door that led into the house. There were rails on both sides. Smooth, sanded rails.
I walked over to it before I could stop myself. I put my hand on the rail.
It was exactly the right height for my hand.
Not his hand. Wendell was six foot two.
Mine.
My name is Winona Pruitt. I was an ER nurse for thirty four years at Baylor in Dallas.
I still check people’s color when they walk into a room. I can’t help it. Gray around the mouth, that’s the heart. Yellow in the whites of the eyes, that’s the liver. Too pink and too sweaty, that’s somebody whose sugar is off. Thirty four years of triage doesn’t wash out of you just because you hand in your badge.
My husband Dwight used to say I couldn’t even enjoy a church picnic without diagnosing half the congregation.
“Brother Lyle’s color is bad,” I’d whisper to him over the potato salad.
“Winnie, eat your chicken.”
“I’m just saying. Somebody ought to check his pressure.”
Brother Lyle had a heart attack six weeks later. Dwight never teased me about it again.
But I didn’t catch it with Dwight.
That’s the thing I’ve carried for two years. I could spot a heart attack across a fellowship hall, and I didn’t catch it in my own husband. He came in from mowing on a hot Saturday in November, said his arm felt funny, sat down in his brown recliner by the window and said he’d be fine after a glass of tea.
By the time I came back from the kitchen with the tea, he wasn’t fine.
I did CPR on my own living room carpet until the ambulance came. I knew. I knew before they got there. I’d seen that color a thousand times.
Dwight’s recliner still sits by the window of our house in Seagoville. It’s brown corduroy, worn smooth on the arms where his hands went. Nobody sits in it. I dust around it. Every week, I dust the end table and the lamp and the windowsill and I run the cloth all the way around that chair like it’s a little island.
My daughter Megan said once that I ought to get rid of it.
“I will,” I said. “When I’m ready.”
That was two years ago. 