“Today Robert told me again that I do nothing. I wonder whether he would notice if I stopped.”
Emily told me later that her father sat there for a long time without speaking.
Then he covered his face and cried.
On the twenty-fifth day, he came to Linda’s house.
I opened the door.
He looked different. Tired. Unshaven. His shirt was wrinkled.
“Margaret,” he whispered, “I didn’t know.”
I looked at him.
“You didn’t want to know, Robert.”
He lowered his head.
“I thought because I brought home the money, I was doing the important part.”
“And what about everything I did?”
He swallowed.
“I was wrong.”
Then he reached into his pocket and took out my wedding ring.
“Please come home.”
For a moment, I remembered the young man I’d married thirty-eight years earlier.
But I also remembered twenty years of humiliation.
“I’m not coming home just because you finally learned to operate a washing machine,” I told him.
