Chapter 1: The Golf Bag
The phone buzzed inside my husband’s golf bag at 11:42 p.m. on our twentieth anniversary.
I was in the garage in my robe because Mark had a tee time at seven and had asked me, sweetly, half asleep, if I’d grab his good glove out of the bag so he wouldn’t wake me in the morning. Twenty years, and he still thought I slept through his alarms. I didn’t. I never had.
The buzz came from the side pocket, the one with the broken zipper he always said he’d fix.
Mark’s phone was upstairs on the nightstand, charging. I’d watched him plug it in.
I unzipped the pocket anyway.
It was a cheap black phone, the kind you buy at a gas station. The screen was lit. One new message.
Dad, don’t forget my recital. Love, Lily.
I read it four times. I’m a nurse. I’ve read a lot of bad news on a lot of screens, and I know the way your brain tries to rearrange the letters into something else. Wrong number. A coworker’s kid. A joke.
We have one child. Ethan. He’s nineteen and a sophomore at Penn State, and he has never in his life signed anything “Love.”
The phone wasn’t locked. Of course it wasn’t. Who would ever look?
I sat down on the step between the garage and the laundry room, in my robe, with the motion light clicking off over my head, and I scrolled.
Texts from “Home.” Running late? Lasagna’s in the oven. Lily got a 94 on her bio test!! Miss you already. Drive safe, Michael.
Michael.
My husband’s name is Mark Michael Carter. Nobody has called him Michael since his grandmother died.
There were photos. Not many. He was careful, even here. A birthday cake with a 15 in candles. A girl with long, light-brown hair and a violin tucked under her chin. The same girl at a kitchen table, laughing at something, her eyes squinted shut.
She had his eyes. Hazel, a little green around the middle. I’d spent twenty years loving those eyes on another face. I’d have known them anywhere.
The last photo was a selfie. My husband, in the light-blue shirt I’d ironed for him on Tuesday, before his “Ohio territory week,” with his arm around a woman with dark curly hair. Behind them, a yellow house with white shutters and a porch swing.
Upstairs, I could hear him snoring.
Two hours earlier, he’d been holding my hand across a white tablecloth at Morton’s. He’d given me a bracelet with twenty tiny gold links, one for every year. He’d made a toast. To the only woman who’s ever been able to put up with me. The waiter had brought a candle in a slice of cheesecake, and Mark had looked at me like I was still twenty-eight.
I looked down at the bracelet now, on my wrist, in the dark.
I should have gone upstairs. I should have woken him, thrown the phone at his chest, screamed loud enough for the neighbors. That’s what women do in movies. I’d seen it a hundred times on my couch, with him beside me, eating popcorn.
But I’d also spent twenty-two years in emergency rooms, and I knew the first rule of a crisis. Don’t move the patient until you know where the injury is.
So I opened the contacts.
There were only six. A pizza place in Columbus. A dentist in Westerville. Someone named “Coach Dana.” A school. “Lily.” And “Home.”
My thumb was shaking so badly I had to use the other hand to hold it still.
I pressed “Home.”
It rang twice. I almost hung up. I almost threw the phone into the recycling bin and went to bed and decided I’d dreamed it.
Then a woman answered. Her voice was soft and sleepy and warm, the voice of someone who’d been waiting up.
“Michael? Honey?” she said. “Are you okay? It’s so late.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“Michael?” A little worried now. Behind her, faintly, a TV was playing. “Did you make it to your sister’s okay?”
