His Other Wife novel · Chapter 6 of 16

Chapter 6: The Lawn

They left together.

Jonathan carried Noah's backpack.

Clarissa held Noah's hand.

Noah waved at me from the door with his free one, the way you wave at a friend's mom after a playdate.

The door swung shut.

The lilies were still on my feet.

The nurse picked them up without a word and dropped them in the trash.

"Thank you," I whispered.

"Honey," she said, "I've been doing this job nineteen years. That's the first time I ever wanted to hit a visitor with a bedpan."

Behind the curtain, Dolores started to cry for me, so I didn't have to.

They discharged me two days later.

My ribs were taped. My arm was in a sling.

My hospital bracelet was still on my wrist because I couldn't get it off with one hand.

Nobody came to pick me up.

I took a cab home.

It cost forty-one dollars, and I had forty-three.

The cab turned onto our street, and the driver slowed down on his own.

"Uh, ma'am. Is that your place?"

Our front lawn was covered in black trash bags.

Twenty of them, maybe thirty.

One had split open.

My clothes were spilling out of it onto the wet grass.

My work shoes. My winter coat. The yellow sweater I wore when Noah was born.

My grandmother's piano bench sat on the curb with its legs in the gutter.

"Keep the change," I told the driver.

There wasn't any.

I walked up the path with my one good arm.

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