I worked the stitches loose, and what slid out into my palm stopped me cold, because it was a card, laminated, the size of a driver’s license, with my wife’s name printed on it and a hospital’s name under that.
ANTICOAGULATION CLINIC. Patient: Marie E. Vandergriff. Warfarin. Target range. An emergency number. A little box in the corner where somebody had written a date in the previous March.
March. She gave me that sweater in October.
Folded flat behind the card, thin as the wool itself, was a letter from a doctor in Huntington I had never heard of, and the words in it that I have read maybe two hundred times since are recurrent clotting and inherited factor and the phrase we discussed the risks.
My wife knew. She had known for seven months. She sat across from me every single night of those seven months and passed me the beans and never said one word.
Her own note was under the letter, written small to fit.
If you’re reading this then it happened and I’m sorry, and I’m sorrier that I let you find out this way. I couldn’t watch you look at me the way you looked at your mother those last two years. So I made you something with my hands instead, and I put my hands in every row of it, and now you have them. Wear it. There’s more to it than you think. — M.
I sat down on the bedroom floor with a sweater in my lap and a church donation box by the door and I do not know how long I was there.
She’d been knitting it since April. I remember her at it in the evenings with the news on, and I remember asking once what it was going to be and her saying, you’ll see, and me not asking again because I was thinking about a shotgun in a catalog.
She knitted it a size big. Sleeve a touch long, which I had made a private little joke of to myself. Our daughter told me later that her mother made it that way on purpose, because she said a man loses weight when he’s grieving and she didn’t want it hanging on me.
She thought that far ahead. She sat there counting rows and thinking about what size I’d be a year after she was gone.
I said you didn’t have to, meaning she shouldn’t have, and I folded her seven months into a drawer, and she heard exactly what I meant because she always did, and she never once defended herself. A month later there was a cold morning and her side of the bed was empty and that was the end of thirty-four years.
I wear that sweater now near about every day from October to April. My son-in-law offered to have the sleeve taken up and I like to have taken his head off.
The rocking chair is on the porch. Nobody sits in it. But if you come up my walk between the first frost and the thaw you will find me on the step in plain brown wool, and my wife’s hands are still on me, and I have quit being a man who hopes for a better gift than the one he was handed.