…he was telling her about the year.
Not raving. Not the way you’d think. He was sitting there with his boots on and his hands on his knees, giving a report — the truck needed a transmission, his sister’s knee got replaced, corn was down, he’d finally fixed the gate. Ordinary things. The kind of things you’d tell somebody over supper if there was somebody to tell.
I should have shut the door. I stood there instead, and he heard me, and he didn’t jump. He just said, without turning around, that it was all right, and would I come back in twenty minutes.
I came back in twenty minutes. He had his hat on and the money under the lamp like always, and he told me the rest of it standing in the parking lot.
Her name was Ruth. September of 2019, forty-one miles east of here on the interstate, a semi that came across the median at four in the morning. She was driving. He was asleep in the passenger seat and he woke up in Flagstaff two days later and she was already buried.
They’d stopped at this motel every year going out to her mother’s. Room 14 both times, because there’s a window on the west end and she liked to watch the light go.
So the last Thursday of every month he drives two hours, checks into 14, sets out her towel and her cup, and catches her up. Then he drives home.
He asked was I going to say anything to the office. I told him the office doesn’t know what a towel means.
He still comes. I still find two of everything. And now when I make up 14 on the Wednesday before, I put the second towel on the far side of the bed myself, folded the way she’d have wanted it, and I don’t tell him that either.
