Sometimes I think he’s better … and then we’re out to eat and the coughing begins and I forgot—he forgot, we forgot—an inhaler (which bag was it in??) and then the looks from the other diners start

and I swear he’s not dying and I’m not a bad wife for sitting here unconcerned as he runs to the bathroom—I’m a tired wife I’m a we’ve-been-here-before wife I’m a we-should-know-better wife

because this is part of our normal, and sometimes things like lettuce are incompatible

with my husband’s ability to breathe and sometimes I’m incompatible with my husband’s ability to breathe and I look like a lonely wife, a sad wife, an in-over-her-head wife, an ungrateful wife, a haughty wife as I sit and look at my phone in the booth while he’s off regurgitating part of his meal.

Wife wife wife

Right now I exist only in relation to him and his inability to eat a $10 burger without asphyxiating and

whose responsibility is it—really—to make sure he remembers lettuce can be a problem, and what does the term “care partner” even mean when he’s able to make medical decisions, dietary choices on his own but I fill out the VA paperwork and order his prescriptions so he can continue to work to pay our mortgage, my health insurance, the electricity that powers his air purifiers

and when he gets back to our table I realize saying fuck the Army isn’t appropriate in a family-friendly restaurant but really when are we ever family-friendly? And I trace invisible hearts on the back of my husband’s hand as I listen to him hack, hack, hack in between slurps of strawberry lemonade and we talk about what we have to pick up at Target because this is what normal couples do on a Sunday night—they don’t think about dying in a restaurant; they remember they ran out of yogurt.

___

Liz Sauchelli lives with her husband, four cats and hundreds of books in a Victorian-era home that used to be a funeral parlor. She works as a reporter/editor at a daily newspaper in Northern New England. After studying creative writing as an undergraduate at SUNY Oswego nearly 15 years ago, Liz has recently returned to creative nonfiction to try to make more sense of things. Brevity is the first literary journal to publish her work.

Artwork by Michael Todd Cohen