The Last Odd Day Read Online Free

mild, the period that lulls you into a false sense that little to no maintenance is required. Then when the husband has grown accustomed to fresh baking smells in the kitchen and passionate surprises in the bedroom, when he is used to wearing no coat and leaving the windows opened, suddenly there is a brutal blast and the sky changes colors and a storm snaps power lines and brings any movement to a halt.
    Women more than men, I have noticed, hide vital information about themselves from the one they promise to love. It is an old trick handed down from mother to daughter, an ancient tool of survival that says in subtle hints, “Pay attention to this!”
    It is as if we learn that what we have is not acceptable and that if we are found out, the cat discovered and let out of the bag, we will be left abandoned and ashamed. So that even after years of courting, intimate conversations, and private moments, there are still secrets we do not share. We marry in hopes that the secrets will be consumed by the fire of our love and the ashes buried by vows of fidelity and our sincere longing to please one man.
    We start out with a grand twisting of desire and romance, actually believing that we can guess what a husband needs even before hearing it and that we are capable of fulfilling every craving he might have. We spend hours, days, weeks scheming and planning to make him surprised and happy that he would have picked such a mate, such a woman as I.
    And for a few months, maybe even a year, we think it has worked; we believe that we have tamed the blues and hushed the relentless whisper from our hearts that says, You cannot be the thing you are not. We push and pull, starve and curse the parts of ourselves we have been toldare not to be mentioned or shown; and we pray that they will not spill or sneak outside our hold.
    Then a sharp crack of lightning flashes, a tiny fissure develops. There is a shifting of the low heavy clouds. He comes home and doesn’t seem to appreciate enough or notice enough; and like a sudden and surprising storm of jagged, blinding pellets of ice, we freeze, paralyzing what has become familiar.
    Generally, this unexpected storm of truth does not destroy the landscape or obliterate the home. It merely chills things, causes a marriage to catch its breath, the trees to bend low. Eventually everything snaps back into place. But after that first unsuspected blow of winter, no one walks about carelessly again.
    O.T. and I weathered our first winter storm when he walked in on a Saturday, from the hog lot, mud on his shoes and a stupid grin on his face, and sat down at the table at a quarter after eleven expecting lunch. Never mind that I had worked my shift and three hours overtime or that I was on my way out to the grocery store to replenish what was gone.
    Because of what I had been doing for nine and a half months since he had returned from overseas and because of what he had seen his mother do all his life, he just assumed a meal, hot and hearty, would greet him anytime he sat down at the table. I threw a loaf of bread, the jarof mustard, and two slices of bologna at him and walked out the door, slamming it behind me. He never came in the house in quite the same way again.
    The storm, fast and furious, blasted through; and from then on O.T. and I understood how quickly the sky can change. Afterward, we never took warmth or comfort for granted again. We survived, but there was a shift in the marriage.
    Three months from the day after Maude had her crazy water dream about me, that day a young woman called for my husband, there was a flimsy report of potential snow flurries in central North Carolina. Since I had skidded across the road and into the side of a bridge the previous year during a bout of freezing rain and because I understood the consequences of dismissing such signs both in the weather and in relationships, I left early for Sunhaven to visit O.T.
    Usually I arrived at the nursing home just after