In Good Times and in Bad…

When you’ve been married long enough, your attention is easily seized by the subtlest changes in your husband’s behavior. A little before midnight last Thursday, the husband and I are in our bedroom. I’m lying in bed, reading, and Lee is checking his work email. Then, out of the blue, he gets up and says, “I have to make a phone call.” I say, “Why don’t you make it here?” To which he answers, “It’s private.”

I stay in bed, but I hear his muffled voice coming from the basement. The fact that he has to talk on the phone in the basement so that I’m not within earshot worries me. Some time passes by. My eyes grow heavy, and curiosity is not enough to keep me awake.

1:30 a.m. My husband taps my elbow. I open my eyes. Hovering over me, he says, “I have something to tell you.” He sits down on the bed next to me. That’s when my heart begins to beat faster.

“I think I’m gonna get let go tomorrow.”

I continue listening.

“It’s too complicated for me to explain to you, but I pieced it all together, and I’m pretty sure tomorrow is my last day.”

One thing about my husband. He has an exceptional ability to observe and evaluate his surroundings. He can read people, make conclusions based on their words, actions, gestures. He has this uncanny ability to filter out “unnecessary” emotion and opinion to see things as they are (can you imagine what our marriage must be like—this man with someone like me?). As a result, Lee can very often see the reality behind the pretense. He’s also a very pragmatic man. When he speaks, he only says what “needs” to be said, nothing more, nothing less. So when he tells me all this, I have no doubt that his hunch is correct.

A slew of words come out of me. Among them, “I love you,” “I trust you,” “Are you okay?” Then came the more realistic questions—how are we going to handle our finances? Considering Lee had just begun this new position last June, we were worried about what his severance package would be. Two weeks, perhaps? A month? We started to list all the “fat” in our monthly budget and began to decide which ones needed to be eliminated.

After an hour of discussion, I open the Bible to Philippians 4 and read it aloud. Then I pray for the both of us. In my prayer, I even prayed that God would grant Lee the sleep he needed, even in the midst of the circumstances. Afterward, Lee tells me he needs some time alone, so he goes downstairs. At 4:30 in the morning, when I still can’t sleep, I go downstairs to find him. He’s fallen asleep on the family room couch. I wake him—advise him to go to sleep in the bed. He does so, and falls sleep until 8:00 the next morning.

Lee puts on a dress shirt and pants the next morning to prepare for work. He wants to look his best for his last day. Later in the morning, I tell my sister to pray for me. Prior to leaving the house, Lee had told me not to share the situation with anyone until he knew what was really going to happen. Late in the morning, I tell my sister to pray for me. I tell her I can’t tell her why—though I knew in my heart I would feel better if I did. So I say to my sister, “Would I be a bad wife if I told you even though Lee told me I couldn’t?” She chuckles, “No… He didn’t say—me— in particular; he said, ‘anyone.’” I hesitate. “Okay, I’ll guess—so you really wouldn’t be telling me.” I, of course, agree to that. (My sister and I have an unspoken understanding that when we say to one another, "Don't tell anyone," our husbands are the exceptions; there really needs to be a clause in the confidentiality agreement with our husbands that the same holds true for sisters.) My sister guesses correctly. And that’s when I recount the events that had taken place since late Thursday night.

“Do you have time to pray?” My sister then says. I said, “Yes, I prayed last night and this morning.” “I meant, do you have time to pray right now?” So over the phone, my sister prays for Lee and me, and as I listened to her words, I began to cry, and then she began to cry.

Nathaniel and I spend the afternoon at my sister’s place. We played with the kids, snacked on chips and cookies, joked around, meanwhile, in the background, my thoughts went back to what Lee was going through. When I got home at around 2:45 p.m., Lee’s car was already in the garage.

I knew that what he said would happen, had happened.