Part 1: The Porch Light
The garage door stood wide open.
Somewhere inside, a radio was playing. George Strait, low and scratchy. The whole place smelled of fresh cut pine and paint.
I was standing at the edge of the gravel drive in my good shoes and my good blouse, the one with the little blue buttons, and my feet would not carry me any farther.
My son had warned me about what I’d find out here. A wife, maybe. A girlfriend. A man with something to hide, who had his eye on my dead husband’s insurance money.
I’d driven forty minutes down back roads to prove him wrong. Or to prove him right. By then I honestly couldn’t tell which one scared me more.
Then I looked into that garage, and I saw the ramp.
It was long and wide, built of brand new lumber, so fresh the wood was still pale and sticky with sap. It climbed from the concrete floor of the garage all the way to the door into the house. There were rails on both sides. Smooth, sanded rails.
I was beside it before I could stop myself. I laid 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 suffered a heart attack six weeks later. After that, Dwight never teased me about it again.
But I didn’t catch it with Dwight.
That’s what I’ve carried for two years. I could spot a heart attack from across a fellowship hall, and I missed it in my own husband. He came in from mowing on a hot Saturday in November, said his arm felt funny, lowered himself into 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 that tea, he wasn’t fine.
I did CPR on my own living room carpet until the ambulance arrived. 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 rested. 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 as if it were a little island.
My daughter Megan told me once that I ought to get rid of it.
“I will,” I said. “When I’m ready.”
That was two years ago.
For a long while after Dwight died, I went nowhere but the grocery store, church, and the cemetery out on Highway 175. My knees saw to that. Thirty four years on hospital floors will grind your knees down to gravel. By sixty four, I couldn’t kneel in the garden anymore. Some mornings I had to take the porch steps sideways, like a crab.
Last June, my neighbor Carla ran out of patience with me.
Carla is seventy one and lives across the street. She’s been widowed eleven years, wears bright pink lipstick to the mailbox, and does not believe in sitting around.
“There’s a grief group at the senior center,” she said, standing on my porch with her purse already on her arm. “Tuesdays at ten. Coffee’s terrible but the people are nice. You’re coming.”
“I’m not much for groups.”
“You’re not much for anything these days, Winona. Get your shoes.”
So I got my shoes.
About a dozen of us sat in a little room with folding chairs, a big coffee urn, and a box of Kleenex on every table. A cheerful young woman named Brooke led it. She had Carla write my name tag in big black marker.
WINONA, in letters about two inches high.
“Lord, Carla,” I said, peeling off the backing. “I look like a kindergartner.”
“You act like one, too,” she said, and slapped it on my chest.
That’s where I met Wendell.
He sat across the circle from me. A big, quiet man in a pressed plaid shirt buttoned all the way to the top. His name tag said WENDELL in neat block letters he must have written himself, because they were straight as a ruler.
He had the biggest hands I’d ever seen on a man. Careful hands. He held his little styrofoam cup of terrible coffee as though it might break.
When his turn came, he said his name was Wendell Haskins. He was sixty six. He’d retired from the electric co op after thirty eight years as a lineman. His wife, Ruth, had passed fourteen months before.
“ALS,” he said. Then he stopped. He studied his coffee cup for a long time. “That’s all I got today. Sorry.”
Brooke said that was fine. That was more than fine.
I watched him while the others spoke. I couldn’t help it. His color was fine, but he wore the look I used to see on family members in the ER waiting room at three in the morning. Like a man who’s held his breath so long he’s forgotten how to let it out.
The second week, I came in late. My knees had been bad that morning, and the porch steps took me a while. By the time I arrived, everyone was already seated.
Wendell rose when he saw me. He went to the coffee urn, came back with a cup, and handed it to me.
“Two creams,” he said. “Right?”
I stared at him. “How’d you know that?”
He shrugged and sat back down. “You took two creams last week. I was paying attention.”
I didn’t know what to say. Dwight drank coffee with me every morning for thirty nine years, and to this day I’m not sure he could have told you how I took it.
The third week, after group, Wendell walked me to my car.
“Your porch light’s out,” he said.
“How do you know about my porch light?”
“You said it last week. When Brooke asked what’s hardest. You said it was little things. You said the porch light’s been out since your husband passed and you keep forgetting to get a new bulb, and every time you come home at night, it’s dark.”
I’d forgotten saying it. He hadn’t.
“It’s not the bulb,” I said. “I tried the bulb. Dwight always said it was the wiring. He kept meaning to look at it.”
“I was a lineman for thirty eight years,” Wendell said. “I can look at it.”
He came that Saturday. He spent two hours on a ladder on my front porch with his toolbox while I stood at the bottom handing him things and trying not to fuss. He replaced the switch and a whole length of wire inside the wall. When he flipped it on, the porch light glowed bright and yellow for the first time in almost two years.
I stood in my front yard looking up at it, and I had to put my hand over my mouth.
“Winona?” he said from the ladder. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Get down from there before you fall. I’m making you supper.”
I made chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans with bacon. He ate two helpings and said it was the best meal he’d had in a year and a half. Then he washed the dishes without being asked, dried them, and asked where everything went.
The next Sunday, he came back for supper. Then the Sunday after that.
By August, it was every Sunday.
I want to be honest about something. I never thought I’d want another man in my life after Dwight. I didn’t want one now, exactly. I wasn’t looking for a husband. I’d had one. A good one.
But it was nice to cook for two again. It was nice to have somebody to talk to while I peeled potatoes. It was nice to hear a man’s voice in the house, a deep, slow voice laughing at something on the TV.
Wendell didn’t say much. But he listened like no man I’d ever known.
One Sunday in July, I was standing at the stove with my knees acting up. I had to grip the counter to lift the cornbread from the oven.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Just my knees. Thirty four years on hospital tile.” I laughed. “I’ll end up in a wheelchair like Mama did. You watch. Then you’ll have to push me around.”
I meant it as a joke. Wendell didn’t laugh.
He looked at me for a long moment across the kitchen. Then he looked down at his plate.
“Your mama was in a wheelchair?”
“The last eight years of her life. Arthritis. Her hips and knees both.”
“Where’d she live?”
“Out in Kaufman. The house I grew up in.” I set the cornbread on the table. “Little old farmhouse. She wouldn’t move. My brother and I begged her, but she said she’d been in that house fifty years and she’d die in it.” I smiled. “She painted the kitchen buttercup yellow when I was six. I remember sitting on the counter while she did it. She said yellow was the color of a happy kitchen. Every time I walked in, it was like the sun was coming up.”
“Buttercup yellow,” Wendell repeated.
“That’s what the can said. Buttercup.”
Two Sundays later, out of nowhere, he brought it up again.
“That kitchen. Your mama’s. Was it a pale yellow, or a bright yellow?”
“Pale,” I said, surprised. “Like butter. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
Then a month after that, while I was washing up, he asked a third time. “Did the cabinets match? In your mama’s yellow kitchen? Or were they white?”
“White,” I said. “With little glass knobs. Wendell, why do you keep asking me about my mama’s kitchen?”
He only smiled and dried a plate.
“I like hearing you talk about it,” he said. “You look different when you talk about it.”
I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t ask.
But one thing had begun to bother me.
He never once invited me to his place.
Not once, in four months. He came to my house every Sunday for supper. He fixed my porch light and my garbage disposal and the leaky faucet in the guest bathroom. He took me to the Mexican place in Mesquite on my birthday. He drove me to the cemetery on Dwight’s birthday and waited in the truck for a whole hour without a word of complaint.
But whenever I said, “Next Sunday, why don’t I come to you for a change?” he’d shake his head.
“It’s not fit for company yet, Winnie.”
That’s what he called me by then. Winnie. Only Dwight had ever called me that.
“I don’t care what it looks like. I was a nurse. I’ve seen worse than a messy house.”
“Give me till Christmas,” he said. “It’ll be ready by Christmas.”
I’m sixty four years old. I’ve heard every excuse a man can make. Dwight’s brother Earl kept a whole second family in Tyler for eight years and told his wife he was driving a truck route. I was the one who sat with her in the ER when she found out and tried to swallow a bottle of her sleeping pills.
So that one nagged at me. It’s not fit for company. Give me till Christmas.
And I noticed things. I can’t turn that off.
Sawdust in the cuffs of his jeans. Little pale curls of it, the kind a power saw leaves behind.
A splinter in his palm he hadn’t bothered to pull out. I took it out myself with my tweezers at the kitchen table, and he winced and said, “Mean nurse,” and I said, “You’d better believe it.”
Paint on his knuckles. A pale yellow. Scrubbed, but not all the way, the kind of paint that settles in the creases and won’t budge for soap.
When I asked about the paint, he just smiled.
“Puttering,” he said.
“Puttering at what?”
“This and that.”
And one Sunday in September, he came in and sat down in Dwight’s recliner.
Nobody had sat in that chair in two years. I stopped in the kitchen doorway with a dish of macaroni and cheese in my hands. I opened my mouth to say something.
Wendell’s head tipped back against the corduroy, his eyes closed, and he was out cold. Asleep in about ten seconds. His big careful hands went slack on the worn arms of the chair, right where Dwight’s used to rest.
I stood and looked at him for a long time.
Out of habit, I checked his color. A little gray under the eyes. Tired. Not sick, I didn’t think. Just a man who’d been working too hard at something.
I didn’t wake him. I let him sleep forty five minutes while the macaroni went cold. It was nice to see somebody in that chair. I hadn’t known how much I wanted to see somebody in that chair until he was in it.
When he woke, he was embarrassed.
“I’m sorry, Winnie. I don’t know what happened. I was up late last night.”
“Doing what?”
He hesitated.
“Puttering,” he said.
My son Zach did not like Wendell. Not from the first minute.
