Valediction

Marcy Watters opened her eyes as light from the grey February dawn softened the dark corners of the room where she had slept alone.

After fifty-seven years of marriage Roy and Marcy had been separated on two occasions. The first was when Roy had been stranded overnight along the bread delivery route that he drove each week through central Illinois. A blizzard that developed in the early morning hours had dumped thirteen inches of snow on the highway, and by four o'clock even the state roads were impassable. Roy stayed overnight at his brother's house in Charleston, forty miles south of the house in Villa Grove where Marcy waited up all night, rocking their newborn daughter Jane. Though Roy had called Marcy to tell her that he was safe, she couldn't keep from worrying: she was eighteen, a mother, and alone.

The second occasion was when Marcy, against her better judgment, agreed to accompany her son Tom and his family on an overnight trip to St. Louis. Unable to leave his job, Roy had stayed home to work at the hardware store where he was the weekend manager. Despite Tom's best attempt to show his mother a good time, Marcy couldn't relax. It was uncomfortable for her to be apart from Roy.

When Roy left her for the third and final time, Marcy did not know what to do. She remained with his body in the hospital room for as long as the coroner would allow her, but eventually the hospital manager was called to help remove her from the room. Jane and Tom had both moved out of the state, and though they both made arrangements to fly back to Illinois as quickly as they could when they received the news, no one could have anticipated the suddenness of Roy's passing. Six months earlier he had shingled their house by himself. After the hospital manager spoke to Tom on the phone, he made arrangements for someone to drive Marcy to her house--Roy's house--where she slept in a bed alone for the first time in over twenty years.

Marcy rolled onto her side and looked out the window beside her bed. A red cardinal was perched in the leafless lilac bush. He cocked his head and seemed to peer into the window, returning Marcy's gaze. Slowly, Marcy raised her hand, stretching out pale, thin, blue-veined fingers to the bird. The cardinal looked at the ground, then it flew away.

On the nightstand next to the bed Marcy kept a plastic cup where she stored her dentures in water overnight. She reached for the cup and placed the cold oral prostheses into her mouth. The plastic tasted mealy, like dried bologna, but she sucked them into her gums and jawed them into place.

Tossing the covers from her legs, she pulled them over the side of the bed as she sat up. She looked down at her feet as they flattened themselves on the cold wood floor. Her feet looked unfamiliar to her. After seventy-five years of life her entire body seemed to have been transformed, and she didn't recognize herself. Her ankles were thin and bony, and the tops of her feet were corrugated with thick veins. They were not the plump, yet slender feet that slid across Roy's hairy legs for the first time of thousands on her wedding night.

"Do you remember that night, Roy?"

No one answered, and the silence that followed filled her with an emptiness that could be only filled by tears.

When she walked into the bathroom, she pulled a chain that hanged from a light fixture above the mirror, and the small room flooded with yellow light. She looked into the mirror and returned the gaze of a frazzled old woman with deep, sagging wrinkles and white hair. Her eyes were filled with the colors of age: red, blue, yellow, and grey. She put her hands to her cheeks and pushed against her skin, pulling it tight against her cheekbones, but she could not find the face that she had known so many years ago. She searched the face for any sign of remembrance, but was met only with the gaze of an unfamiliar old woman. Summoning the courage to speak to her, Marcy asked, "What do I do now?"

The old woman said nothing. Marcy had hoped that she would tell her something. Perhaps to die, for what else was there left to do? But she had said nothing. She offered no hope for something better to come, no warning for something worse. She gave only one message: nothing.

"Thank you," Marcy said. And she pulled the chain of the light.

Marcy stepped into a seafoam green polyester dress, and placed her best Sunday hat upon her head. She walked into the kitchen and reached for the hook where Roy kept the keys to the Buick. Her hand paused above the keys just before she touched them. Roy was the last to put the keys on the hook, and she placed her hand softly on the keys, caressing them, knowing that one day everything that Roy had touched would disappear, that the world as Roy had left it would forever change. She put the keys to her lips as tears rolled down both cheeks.

She opened the door that separated the kitchen from the garage and pressed the green-lit button of the garage door, which began to open with a clunk, followed by the roar of chains and rollers. Marcy opened the driver's side door of the Buick, a car that she and Roy had owned together for thirteen years, but that she had never driven. Marcy didn't drive. She had driven a tractor on the farm before she was married, and she had driven the car on short errands before Roy had retired. But after Roy's retirement Marcy never had a reason to drive anywhere. Everywhere they went, they went together: the store, the post office, the church, the doctor. And Roy was always the chauffeur.

When she turned the key, the console was illuminated by red and yellow lights that were backlit with indecipherable symbols, and bell chimed fifteen times. Eventually, the chiming stopped, and all but one of the yellow lights turned off. The Buick rumbled under her feet, heaving convulsively like a rooting sow. Marcy stepped on the accelerator, and the car coughed out a cloud of blue smoke that filled the dark garage before the engine settled into a low rumble. Marcy adjusted the rear-view mirror, placed the shifter into reverse, and backed slowly from the garage.

It was still cold in February. The ground was still hardened by frost, and piles of dirty ice lay along the roadways and in parking lots. Marcy drove slowly through town past the downtown shops and grocery stores in the morning traffic of small-town Illinois. At the main four-way intersection in town, Marcy, in her blue-grey sedan, waited at a red light as traffic passed by: High schoolers sped to school in salt-crusted farm trucks. The windows of yellow school buses filled with elementary children were steamed from the inside. On the sidewalk a young couple walked to school hand-in-hand, with backpacks strewn across their shoulders.

A horn blared from behind Marcy's car, and as she looked up she saw that the light had turned green. She turned on her right turn signal and drove the car out of town.

The cemetery where Roy was buried lay twelve miles from town beside the small country church where Roy and Marcy had been married. Marcy had not visited the gravesite since the funeral. On that day there had been sadness, and she had cried, but she did not know how to feel. The death had been so sudden, so unexpected and unlooked for. Though many of their friends and relatives had begun to die at a rate of one or two a month, at the age of seventy-eight Roy was a picture of health. He was fit. He wore the same size pants that he had worn when he joined the Army at eighteen. He was a jocular man with big arms and a bigger heart. His ruddy face brightened a room as he strutted about like a peacock, poking old men in the sides with a smile, bending over to lift toddlers for a kiss, and pulling chairs out for the widows who were waiting for Marcy to pass. Roy was a man who was alive and a man who lived. But Death, when it marked him, took him in a thunderbolt that left many stunned.

It was reasonable that a seventy-eight year-old man could die, and most of the people at church or the lodge came to terms with Roy's passing without much difficulty, despite the initial shock. But for Marcy, the truth of his death had never rested upon her with the severe weight of mortality. He had died and been placed in the ground before she had a moment to reflect that he was really gone. After fifty-seven years with one man, she had lost him in three days. One day to sit beside a bed next to his white, dead body for two and a half hours before she was escorted from the room. One day to receive her children who made quick arrangements in order to catch return flights early the morning after the funeral. One day to receive a line of a hundred guests who paid their respects. And the next morning he was in the ground.

Fifty-seven years.

Marcy would see him again. She needed to go to where he lay and tell him that she wanted him to be with her still. She needed to convince herself that he was stiff and cold beneath the frozen sod. That death had stolen him. That he was not coming back.

Marcy parked the Buick in the parking lot of the church next to the cemetery where her husband was buried. Still sitting in the warm cab of the car, she looked out across the gravestones that rested beneath the overcast February sky. At the end of the row nearest the road Marcy saw a sunken mound of clay beside a stone that was engraved "Watters."

As Marcy stepped from the car, strong winds blew the hat from her head, and it blew across the field and out of her reach. She had not worn a coat, but she turned to face the chill of the winds that whipped her hair from her face. She stumbled uneasily across the gravel lot toward her husband, squinting in the wind and crossing her arms tightly across her chest. As she approached the graveside, the front of the stone came full into her view. When she saw it, she raised her face to the sky and let out a whimpered scream. Marcy walked to the stone and collapsed into a heap of tears as she fingered the name engraved on the front of the marker.