The Last Odd Day Read Online Free Page B

in a plastic grocery bag I had brought to carry home his dirty laundry. I washed his clothes on Wednesdays and Fridays.
    â€œSo sorry, Jean.” A tear rolled down his cheek.
    After O.T. had his stroke, his personality changed. He was more volatile, more emotional, sometimes screaming for no reason, sometimes crying for hours. It was very difficult at first since O.T. was never high-strung. The most upset I ever saw him was when he pulled the tractor offhis daddy and carried him all the way to the fire station, a good mile and a half from the house.
    He was raw and fierce, determined to walk his father back to life. The coroner said Papa had to have died instantly, that amount of weight crushing his whole right side; but it wouldn’t have mattered to O.T. even if he had known that when it happened. He was not about to put his father down until he laid him on the stretcher in the fire truck.
    I yelled at him from the house, told him I’d bring the car around; but he threw his father across his shoulders and just started walking. By the time I got the keys and pulled the car out of the driveway, he was halfway across the field and farther away from me. I followed him along the road, blowing the horn and trying to get him to walk to the car. He just kept moving, until finally he stopped and in a voice that could only come from grief, he roared, “Damn it, Jean, just go to the station and tell Jimmy to meet me with the truck.”
    And so I did. I left my husband walking across a field of soybeans, his father, bloody and broken, slung around his shoulders, and drove down the dirt road to the fire station. Jimmy Morgan and Ellis Rumley jumped in the paramedics’ truck and met him just as he was coming out of the field. And by the time I got to them O.T. had calmed down and was standing behind the two EMTs,just rubbing his neck and shaking his head. He didn’t even cry at the funeral.
    The time I left him to go to Wrightsville Beach, he showed up the fifth day. But after seeing me and realizing that what I mostly needed was space, he never said a word, never explained how he found me or why it took him five days. He never talked about what happened or what it was like for him.
    He put some money on the table by the window in the motel room, cupped his big hand around the top of my head, pressing me to the earth, and walked out.
    When I got home, he was a little more tender, a little more careful with his words; but he did not cry or twirl me around in glee, he just helped me take the bags out of the car, placed the china back in the corner of the hutch, drew me a bath, and fixed me a banana sandwich, which he fed to me as I sat in the tub.
    He never, in our entire state of matrimony, ever raised his voice or became overwhelmed by emotion. Only that scream from the field of sorrow and a look in his eye when he came to the ocean that almost melted the hard shell surrounding my heart.
    There at the last, seeing him cry became a normal thing. Although it was troublesome and difficult for me at first, after more than a year and a half it was just a part of who my husband had become.
    â€œThere, there, old man, there’s no need to lose it over spilled oatmeal.” And I wiped the tears from his eyes. “You’re just having one of your sad spells.”
    He turned away from me and stared out the window. He nodded his head like there was nothing more to be said. “Red birds run the others off.”
    I noticed where he was watching the feeder. A large male cardinal was sitting on the small post that extends from the dark round opening where the seed was most plentiful.
    â€œFat ole thing, isn’t he?”
    O.T. laughed. “Who you calling fat?” And somehow through the bars of his hospital bed he was able to reach out and pinch me on the rear. He startled me.
    O.T. could seem clear and normal at certain moments. He would remember names and dates, circumstances surrounding events that