And I made myself a deal on the Number 13 bus going home. One year. I’d give it one year, and I’d keep the bag, and if you picked up a drink in that year I would be on the next 11:40 with no goodbye.
We got home at two in the morning. You were sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. You looked up at me and you didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything. I put Tasha to bed. Mr. Hoppity had fallen out somewhere, in the station or the bus, and I didn’t know it till morning. I lay down beside you with all my clothes on.
At six in the morning I got up and walked to Ezekiel Booker’s house on Bloom Street and knocked on his door in my bathrobe and told him everything. I knew Zeke had been sober since 1970. I knew he went to meetings. Everybody on the Avenue knew that, everybody but you, because you never wanted to know. I told him if he didn’t come get you, I was leaving, and he would be losing his best barber one way or the other. Zeke put on his hat and said, Go home, daughter. Go home and make coffee and don’t say a word to him. I’ll be there at seven. And he made me promise never to tell you I’d come. He said a man has to believe he was found. He said if you knew your wife had to go get you, part of you would always think you hadn’t really come on your own, and that part would be the part that drank.
So I never told you. For twenty-four years you believed the Lord sent Zeke Booker to your door. Maybe He did. He just sent him by way of me, in a bathrobe, at six in the morning.
Then I came down here to Bethel Hope and took the bag out from under our basement stairs and put it in my choir locker, number seven, behind my robe, where you would never in a hundred years go looking. And the next Tuesday I walked into the room across the hall from the choir room for the first time, and I told you it was choir practice. Choir practice was Thursdays, Leon. It was always Thursdays. You came to the Christmas concert every year for twenty-four years and never once noticed that the program said Thursday Night Choir.
I want to tell you why I never told you, because I know that is the thing that is going to hurt. It isn’t that I didn’t trust you. I trusted you. By 2005 I trusted you more than I trusted myself. It isn’t that I thought you’d drink again. I didn’t, after the first few years. It’s two things. The first is that I promised Zeke, and Zeke was right, and I watched you every year grow into a man who believed he had saved his own life, and I watched that belief hold you up like a spine. I wasn’t going to be the one to pull it out.
The second is harder to say. The second is that the locker was the only thing in my whole life that was only mine. Not a mother’s. Not a wife’s. Not a nurse’s. Mine. A door I could walk through anytime I wanted and never did. Do you know what it is to have a door like that and not walk through it, year after year? It isn’t the same as having no door. It’s the opposite. Every year I didn’t walk through it, it meant I was staying because I wanted to, and not because I couldn’t go. That was worth more to me than I know how to tell you. I needed to be a woman who could leave, so I could be a woman who stayed.