Because folded flat under that lining, with my name across the front in his block printing, was a list.
Twenty-seven lines on notebook paper, one for every year, and every one of them a place.
1998, the Wigwam Motel outside Cave City. 2003, that awful cabin at Rough River where the raccoon got in. 2009, the Amish restaurant in Berne we drove four hours for and it was closed. 2016, a hospital cafeteria in Louisville — that’s the year my mother died, and he put it on the list anyway, because he told his brother later that it counted.
Every place we ever went together, in order, from a man who could not remember to buy milk.
Under the list was a printed confirmation from the Wigwam Motel. Room 7. Two nights in October.
Room 7 is the room we spent our wedding night in, because it was thirty-one dollars and that was all we had.
His plan — and I only know it because he told his brother and nobody else — was one place a year off that list, working from the beginning forward. He was going to hand me an old suitcase and let me be confused about it, and then tell me at supper.
We’d had a bad spring. I’m not going to lay out our business, but it was the worst year we ever had, and there were things said in February that neither one of us knew how to take back.
So a man hands his wife a suitcase and she hears there’s the door.
I set it in the spare room. I let that whole evening go cold and went to bed without saying goodnight, and I would give every dollar I have to get that night back.
On the back of the list, in the same block printing:
“Alma — I know what a suitcase looks like from where you’re standing. It isn’t that. I’m asking you to go back to the beginning with me. Room 7. It’s already paid for.”
Two weeks later he went down on the floor at the plant and was gone before I could get there.
And that suitcase sat in my spare room for eleven months while I told myself a story about a man who wanted out.
I went to Cave City in October. Room 7 is fifty-eight dollars now, and the woman at the desk let me have it after I told her about half of why.
The list is on my refrigerator. Twenty-seven places.
His brother’s driving me to Rough River in the spring. He says he’ll wait in the truck.
The television is still in the box in the den. I haven’t had the heart, and I’m not sure I ever will.