The Standing She Did Not Know She Had

Like I would call him by dinner.

Like a woman in a hospital bed does not make decisions that rearrange a family.

That laugh is the thing I would want him to have back, if I could give him one regret to keep.

Not the affair, not the son, not the calculation — the laugh.

Because it revealed, more than anything else he did, how completely he had misjudged the woman he had married.

He heard remember this moment and he thought it was a threat made from weakness, the kind of thing a hurt wife says to feel less powerless, the kind of thing that dissolves by morning under the weight of exhaustion and dependence and the simple impossibility of following through.