My Wife Sent Me to a Psych Ward, So I Gave Her a Big Surprise novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Say It Here

"I'm not signing anything at three in the morning on my mother's lawn," I said.

Rosalind kept her hand on the fence.

"Then where?"

"The depot yard, at six, when the day shift clocks in. Every driver who ever hauled a load for me will be standing there."

"You want me to say it in front of them."

"I want you to say it where it costs you something."

My mother pulled her coat closed. "I'll bring the coffee," she said.

At six the yard lights were still on and the sky over the trucks was gray.

Two hundred drivers stood in jackets with thermoses.

At five the dispatcher had keyed the radio and said only, "Be in the yard. It's Mr. Ostrow."

She was waiting at the dispatch door, sixty, with a headset around her neck.

She put a key in my hand.

"Your old office," she said. "I've dusted it every Friday."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Go stand on something."

I stood on the loading-dock step, where I used to give the Christmas speech.

Nobody spoke.

Rosalind came across the asphalt between my mother and Maura.

Her hair was in a rubber band, and the hospital cardigan was buttoned wrong.

My mother poured coffee into paper cups and handed them to the first row of drivers without a word.

Rosalind climbed the step beside me and faced them.

"My name is Rosalind Ostrow," she said. "Three years ago I told a hospital my husband wanted to die. He didn't. I had him held down in our hallway, and I kept him there."

A driver near the front said, "The Christmas card."

"What?"

"We sent him a card every year. All of us signed it."

"I never forwarded it," Rosalind said. "I put it in a drawer."

The yard was so quiet I could hear a reefer unit running on the far fence.

"Why?" said an older driver with a gray mustache.

She looked at me, and then she looked at the ground, and then she made herself look up.

"Because for six years Damon left at five in the morning and came home at nine at night," she said. "I ate dinner at a table for eight by myself. I was a guest in my own marriage. Brooks came to that table. Brooks asked how my day was."

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