He was a quiet man. Kind. Patient. He fixed everything in our house himself, from the dishwasher to the garage door to our daughter’s bicycle chain. He never raised his voice. He laughed with his whole face.
He liked crossword puzzles, Reds baseball, and black coffee. He liked to sing old Patsy Cline songs in the shower, terribly off-key. He liked that couch.
He liked it more than I ever understood.
Part Two: After
Arthur died in March.
It was a heart attack. He was seventy-four. He’d been out in the garage that morning, fixing the lawnmower so it would be ready for spring. He came inside, said he felt tired, and sat down on the couch.
I was in the kitchen making him a sandwich. When I came out with the plate, he was gone.
Just like that. Sitting on his side of the couch, with his crossword puzzle in his lap and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.
The funeral was at St. Luke’s on a gray Saturday. Our daughter, Kate, flew in from Denver with her husband and their two boys. Arthur’s old friends from the base came, a dozen gray-haired men in suits they hadn’t worn in years. They all told stories about Arthur that I’d never heard.
How he’d stayed late on Christmas Eve to fix a plane so a young airman could fly home to his newborn baby. How he’d quietly paid for a coworker’s dental surgery. How he’d taught half the base how to rebuild a carburetor.
I nodded and thanked them and didn’t really hear any of it.
After everyone left, the house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming.
I tried sleeping in our bed. I lay there in the dark, on my side, staring at Arthur’s empty pillow. At the dent in the mattress where he’d slept for forty-two years. I didn’t sleep at all that first night. Or the second.
