My Husband Said He Was at a Cattle Auction Every Tuesday. I Found the Truth in His Pajama Pocket While I Lay in a Hospital Bed

In fifty-one years of marriage I never once went through Harlan Pruitt’s pockets. Not his jeans, not his church coat, not the glovebox of his truck. I’m telling you that first so you understand I wasn’t looking for anything that afternoon. I was just cold.

They admitted me on a Thursday after I passed out in my own kitchen with a pot of apple butter going on the stove. Heart rhythm, the doctor said. Atrial something or other. I came to on the linoleum with the smell of scorched cinnamon in my nose and Harlan’s face over me, white as flour, saying “Retta, Retta, Retta” like it was the only word he had left.

The hospital in Springfield kept me four days. If you’ve ever been in one of those rooms you know how it goes. The bed beeps if you move wrong, the coffee tastes like it was strained through a sock, and every time you finally doze off somebody comes in for more blood. My grandbabies made me a poster with sticky notes all over it and taped it on the wall by the oxygen hookup, and I’ll admit it did more for me than half the pills.

Harlan went home the second night to feed the cattle and bring me some things. He’s 76 and packs a bag like a man who has never packed a bag in his life. He brought my reading glasses, the framed picture of all of us from the Fourth of July, a can of Folgers I had no way on earth to brew, and the red and green plaid wool blanket off the back of the couch, the one we got as a wedding present in 1975. He forgot my nightgowns entirely. So he handed me his own blue striped pajama top and his good wool socks and said, “It’s that or the paper gown, darlin’.”

I chose the striped top. It smelled like him. Barn and Old Spice and those peppermints he’s been chewing ever since he quit tobacco.

Saturday afternoon, around twenty till five, the room got so cold I stuck my hands in the chest pocket to warm them up. There was something folded in there. I figured it was a feed receipt. Harlan’s pockets are mostly feed receipts and lint.

It was a visitor sticker. The kind they print at the front desk with your picture on it, all grainy and gray. Harlan’s face, in his Carhartt jacket. The same hospital I was laying in. Fourth floor. And the date printed in the corner was August 13th.

I sat there and did the arithmetic twice. August 13th was a Tuesday. I know because that week Harlan told me he was going down to the livestock auction in Joplin with Merle Haskins, and he’d be home late, and not to wait supper. I didn’t wait supper. I made myself a tomato sandwich, watched Wheel of Fortune, and never thought one thing about it.

Joplin is an hour and some southwest of us. Springfield is the other direction.

Now, I’m not a jealous woman by nature. But I’ll be honest with y’all, because what’s the point otherwise. Three years ago I did something I’m not proud of. At our church harvest supper I accused my best friend of forty years, Corinne Abernathy, of making eyes at my husband. In front of the whole fellowship hall. Over a buttermilk pie she brought him and a laugh between them I didn’t like. Corinne set down her fork, picked up her purse, and walked out. Two months later I heard she’d sold her house and gone to live near her sister in Florida. We never spoke again. I told myself she ran because she was guilty. Most nights I didn’t really believe it.

So you can imagine what went through my head holding that little sticker. Every ugly thought I’d ever chased off came right back home to roost.

A nurse named Kaylee came in to check my IV. Sweet girl, maybe twenty-five, ponytail, a little rubber duck clipped to her badge. I held the sticker up.

“Honey, what’s up on the fourth floor?”

She leaned in, looked at the picture, and her whole face lit up. “Oh my gosh, is that Mr. Pruitt? Are y’all related?”

“I’m his wife,” I said.

She laughed a little, like I’d made a joke she didn’t quite get. “No, I mean, I floated up there all summer. He came every single Tuesday. Brought her peppermints and read the Farm Journal to her out loud. We all thought it was the sweetest thing.” She tucked the plaid blanket back over my feet. “Everybody up there knew him. He always signed in as her husband.”

Kaylee’s shift ended before I worked up the nerve to ask for the woman’s name. I guess part of me didn’t want it. I didn’t sleep. I just lay there listening to the monitor count my heartbeats, and it was counting fast.

Harlan came Sunday morning at nine with my nightgowns, finally, and a sausage biscuit from Hardee’s he wasn’t supposed to sneak in. I let him set it down. Then I laid the sticker on the tray table between us, right next to my water mug.

He looked at it a long time. He didn’t pretend, I’ll give him that. Harlan never was a good liar, which I suppose is why he’d mostly just kept quiet.

“Who is she, Harlan.”

“It’s Corinne.”

I had braced myself for a lot of names. Not that one.

She never went to Florida. Her sister passed the year before and there was nobody down there to go to. She started forgetting things the spring after that supper. Leaving burners on. Getting lost driving home from the same Walmart she’d shopped at for thirty years. Her son Roscoe works on fishing boats out in Oregon and couldn’t come home, so he called the one number in her address book he remembered from his childhood. Ours. Harlan picked up.

“She made me promise not to tell you,” he said. “Said you had enough reason to hate her already, and she wasn’t gonna give you one more by being pitiful.”

“And the husband part?”

He rubbed his face with both hands. “Retta, by July she thought I was Walt.” Walt Abernathy died of a stroke in 2009. “First time I corrected her she cried for an hour. The nurses said let her have it. So I let her have it. She’d ask did I fix the gutter and I’d say yes ma’am. That’s all it ever was. I swear on Mama’s Bible.”

Then he said the part I still can’t think about without having to sit down.

“And that pie, at the supper. I asked her to make it. It was your mama’s buttermilk recipe. Our forty-eighth was coming up and I wanted to bake it for you myself, and Corinne was teaching me on Wednesday mornings while you were at quilting. That laugh you saw? I’d just told her I burned my fourth crust.”

Three years. Three years I’d made my best friend the villain, and she’d carried it without saying one word in her own defense.

I made Kaylee get me a wheelchair that afternoon. She pushed, Harlan rolled the IV pole, and I held that plaid blanket in my lap because I didn’t know what else to bring. Room 412. Corinne was smaller than I remembered, her hair cut short, sitting by the window in a cardigan buttoned wrong.

She looked at Harlan and said, “Walt.” Then she looked at me, and something cleared in her eyes for just a second.

“Retta. Well, you took your sweet time.”

I told her I was sorry. I told her all of it, crying like a fool in a borrowed pajama top. She patted my hand and said, “Honey, I don’t remember what you’re sorry for. So I guess that settles it.”

I went home that Tuesday. And the next Tuesday, I went back. We both do now. Harlan reads the Farm Journal, I bring the peppermints, and Corinne calls him Walt and calls me Retta, and nobody corrects anybody.

He finally got the crust right in October. Brought the whole pie up to the fourth floor. Corinne ate two pieces and told him it was the best one he ever made.

That plaid blanket stays on her bed now. Corinne’s the one who gave it to us, back in 1975. I think Harlan grabbed it off the couch on purpose.

I spent three years being right. I’d trade every one of them for those Wednesday mornings back.

This story is a work of fiction inspired by a photograph. Names, characters, places and events are imaginary, and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.