I kept thinking about the yellow paper.<\/p>\n
Not every minute of every day, but often enough that I could no longer pretend it was just a piece of paper in a garage.<\/p>\n
Three words had changed the way I looked at Wendell.<\/p>\n
For my Winnie.<\/p>\n
I had read them so many times in my mind that they almost seemed to belong to me now.<\/p>\n
Still, I didn't know why he had written them.<\/p>\n
I didn't know what December 24 meant to him, either.<\/p>\n
And I was trying to learn the difference between being patient with someone and making excuses for him.<\/p>\n
That difference wasn't always easy to see.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, it was only a feeling in my chest when I went home alone.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, it was the question I wanted to ask and decided to save for another day.<\/p>\n
I had done that for weeks.<\/p>\n
Maybe longer.<\/p>\n
I had told myself Wendell needed time.<\/p>\n
I had told myself that a man could have private things without those things being a sign of trouble.<\/p>\n
Both statements were true.<\/p>\n
But neither one answered the question I had been carrying.<\/p>\n
Why had he never let me see his house?<\/p>\n
I tried not to turn that question into a judgment.<\/p>\n
I knew what it felt like to have a life people thought they understood.<\/p>\n
After Dwight died, people had looked at me with sympathy and assumed they knew what I needed.<\/p>\n
They brought food.<\/p>\n
They offered help.<\/p>\n
They told me to stay busy.<\/p>\n
Some spoke as if grief were a room I could leave whenever I was ready.<\/p>\n
Others seemed afraid to mention Dwight's name, as though saying it aloud might hurt me all over again.<\/p>\n
I had learned that people could mean well and still fail to understand what another person was going through.<\/p>\n
That was one reason I had tried to be careful with Wendell.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to decide what his silence meant before I understood it.<\/p>\n
But I also didn't want to spend another year guessing.<\/p>\n
The thought stayed with me as I went about my ordinary days.<\/p>\n
I made coffee.<\/p>\n
I washed dishes.<\/p>\n
I folded clothes and put them away.<\/p>\n
I answered the telephone when it rang.<\/p>\n
The small routines continued, even when my mind wandered back to that garage.<\/p>\n
I could still picture the two pieces of blue painter's tape holding the yellow sheet in place.<\/p>\n
I could see the photographs nearby.<\/p>\n
I remembered the ramp and the buttercup-yellow paint.<\/p>\n
And I remembered Wendell standing at the top of it, looking as if he had been caught in the middle of something he wasn't ready to explain.<\/p>\n
He had gone pale when he saw me looking.<\/p>\n
That reaction had stayed with me more than the words themselves.<\/p>\n
If the paper meant nothing, why had he looked so frightened?<\/p>\n
If the photographs were ordinary, why had he seemed so unprepared for me to see them?<\/p>\n
I didn't know.<\/p>\n
I had no right to pretend I did.<\/p>\n
The only person who could answer those questions was Wendell.<\/p>\n
So I decided I would stop trying to solve the mystery without him.<\/p>\n
That didn't mean I would stop noticing things.<\/p>\n
It meant I would let the facts remain facts until he gave me something more.<\/p>\n
The next time we spoke, I paid attention to the conversation instead of searching every word for a hidden meaning.<\/p>\n
Wendell asked how I had been.<\/p>\n
I told him I was doing all right.<\/p>\n
He listened, as he usually did, without rushing me toward a happier answer.<\/p>\n
Then he asked what I had been doing.<\/p>\n
I told him about the ordinary things that had filled my day.<\/p>\n
He asked a few questions.<\/p>\n
I answered them.<\/p>\n
Nothing remarkable happened.<\/p>\n
Yet I found myself appreciating that ordinary exchange.<\/p>\n
It was good to talk to someone without feeling I had to make every sentence important.<\/p>\n
For a while, I let myself enjoy it.<\/p>\n
Then the silence between us reminded me of the things we hadn't discussed.<\/p>\n
I wondered if he was thinking about the garage, too.<\/p>\n
I wondered if he was waiting for me to ask.<\/p>\n
I could have asked right then.<\/p>\n
The question was ready.<\/p>\n
All I had to do was say his name and tell him I needed to understand.<\/p>\n
Instead, I took a breath and gave him room to speak first.<\/p>\n
I wasn't trying to test him.<\/p>\n
At least, I didn't think I was.<\/p>\n
I simply wanted to know whether he understood that the paper had changed something between us.<\/p>\n
He had let me see a piece of his life without explaining it.<\/p>\n
Now he needed to decide what to do with that moment.<\/p>\n
I couldn't make that decision for him.<\/p>\n
And I couldn't keep making every difficult decision for both of us.<\/p>\n
That evening, I thought about Dwight.<\/p>\n
I remembered how familiar our life together had once felt.<\/p>\n
There had been years when I could tell what Dwight was thinking by the way he set something down or looked toward a window.<\/p>\n
We had shared enough ordinary days to develop our own language.<\/p>\n
Not every part of marriage had been easy.<\/p>\n
We had misunderstood each other.<\/p>\n
We had disagreed.<\/p>\n
We had both said things we wished we could take back.<\/p>\n
But the years had given us time to learn each other's habits.<\/p>\n
After his death, I had sometimes missed even the smallest things.<\/p>\n
The sound of another person moving through the house.<\/p>\n
A voice from another room.<\/p>\n
Someone asking whether I wanted anything from the store.<\/p>\n
I had missed the ordinary interruptions that once seemed so unimportant.<\/p>\n
That was part of what made Wendell's attention matter to me.<\/p>\n
He made room for me in his day.<\/p>\n
He remembered what I said.<\/p>\n
He asked questions and waited for answers.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to overlook those things simply because he had one part of his life he hadn't explained.<\/p>\n
But I also knew that kindness could not replace honesty.<\/p>\n
A person could be thoughtful and still leave someone feeling shut out.<\/p>\n
I could appreciate Wendell without pretending that I had no concerns.<\/p>\n
That was the balance I needed to find.<\/p>\n
I wanted to be fair to him.<\/p>\n
I also wanted to be fair to myself.<\/p>\n
When I thought about the yellow paper again, I tried to remember exactly what I had seen rather than what I feared it might mean.<\/p>\n
The words were clear.<\/p>\n
The date was clear.<\/p>\n
The photographs were there.<\/p>\n
The paint was there.<\/p>\n
And Wendell had been working in the garage.<\/p>\n
Those were the facts.<\/p>\n
Everything else was a question.<\/p>\n
I reminded myself of that whenever my imagination started filling in the empty spaces.<\/p>\n
I didn't need to invent an answer before he had a chance to give me one.<\/p>\n
Nor did I need to convince myself that the answer would be pleasant.<\/p>\n
I only needed to be willing to hear it.<\/p>\n
The next time I thought about December 24, I felt a small tightening in my chest.<\/p>\n
Christmas had always carried memories for me.<\/p>\n
Some were warm.<\/p>\n
Some hurt more than I expected.<\/p>\n
Since Dwight died, I had learned that a holiday could hold both feelings at once.<\/p>\n
I could remember what I had lost and still look forward to something new.<\/p>\n
That didn't make the old love smaller.<\/p>\n
It only meant my life hadn't ended when one chapter did.<\/p>\n
I hoped Wendell understood that.<\/p>\n
I hoped he knew I wasn't asking him to erase my past.<\/p>\n
I was asking him to let me know his.<\/p>\n
I didn't say all of that to him.<\/p>\n
Not yet.<\/p>\n
I was learning that the right words mattered, but so did the right moment.<\/p>\n
And the moment would have to come soon enough.<\/p>\n
I wasn't going to spend Christmas Eve standing outside the life of a man who called me his Winnie.<\/p>\n
If those words meant what I hoped they meant, then he would need to show me.<\/p>\n
Not with a perfect house.<\/p>\n
Not with a grand speech.<\/p>\n
With the truth.<\/p>\n
For now, I let the thought settle.<\/p>\n
I had given Wendell time.<\/p>\n
I had tried to understand him.<\/p>\n
The next step belonged to him.<\/p>\n
And I was ready to listen when he finally took it.<\/p>\n
I kept thinking about the yellow paper. Not every minute of every day, but often enough that I could no longer pretend it was just a piece of paper in … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feel-every-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17921,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17901\/revisions\/17921"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}