Chapter Eight
Elias’s mother arrived a day early.
Ruth Hale is seventy-one, a retired schoolteacher from Spokane, and the only person I’ve ever met who can make my husband stand up straighter by entering a room. She hugged me in the driveway for so long that I started crying into her coat.
“I know,” she said into my hair. “He called me. I know.”
?
“Did you know before?” I asked her. “In November?”
Ruth let go of me and looked me straight in the face.
“January,” she said. “He told me in January. I told him that if he didn’t tell you within a week, I would.”
“He didn’t.”
“No.” Her mouth went thin. “And I didn’t, either. So you can add me to the list.”
?
I appreciated that more than I can say. Everyone else in this story explained themselves. Ruth just stood in the list.
?
She took over the kitchen within an hour. She made chicken soup, and I thought about what I’d told Jess—I’d have made her soup—and had to leave the room.
?
That afternoon, while Elias was at his last pre-op appointment, Ruth and I folded baby clothes on the living room floor.
Forty-two onesies. Jess had counted. Nobody needs forty-two onesies.
“He was like this as a boy,” Ruth said, smoothing a tiny sleeve. “He’d break something and hide it rather than let you see him fail. He once hid a broken window for a week by standing in front of it.”
“For a week?”
“Every time I walked past. I thought he’d become very interested in the garden.”
?
I laughed. Then I asked the question I’d been carrying since the dialysis center.
“Ruth. What happened with Mara? Eight years ago.”
Ruth’s hands stopped moving.
?
“What has he told you?” she asked.
“That there was a car accident. That she was badly hurt. That the engagement didn’t survive it.”
I’d heard that story on our third date. Elias had told it in four sentences, looking at his plate. I hadn’t pushed. I’d thought I was being kind.
Another thing I’d like back.
?
“Is that all?” Ruth said.
“Is there more?”
She picked up the next onesie. Folded it. Folded it again, smaller, until it was a square the size of her palm.
“That’s his to tell,” she said. “I’ve already stood in front of enough of his broken windows.”
?
That night, I did something I’d never done in eleven years.
Elias was in the shower. His phone was on the nightstand.
I picked it up.
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I’m going to be honest about how that felt, because I promised.
My heart was slamming. My hands were shaking. And under the fear there was something ugly and hot, something that said finally.
I wanted to catch him.
I wanted there to be something so bad that I would never again have to wonder whether I was being unfair.
?
I typed in his passcode. His birthday—the same since we met.
The screen shook its head at me.
Incorrect passcode.
?
I tried again. Same.
Behind the bathroom door, the shower was still running.
In eleven years, my husband had never once changed his passcode.
I put the phone down exactly where I’d found it, lay back against the pillows, and listened to the water run, and wondered when he’d changed it.
And what for.