Saturday 6/26/99

113 today. The asphalt on the street is soft enough to take a thumbprint.

Marlys came out of the bedroom at four this afternoon, dressed, with her hair combed, and sat down across from me at the kitchen table with a flyer. Her group is going to a UFO conference in Sedona in August. Friday to Sunday, the 13th to the 15th, at a resort hotel up there. Speakers, a panel of experiencers, the whole business. Norma is driving up with three of them.

Marlys said, "I want to go. I want you to come with me." Then she said, "You don't have to believe anything. You just have to come."

It's the first thing she's wanted since before Christmas. I said yes before she got to the end of the sentence. Then I went out to the garage and stood in front of the fan for a while so she wouldn't see my face.

I'll be honest. Part of me thinks a weekend of lights-in-the-sky talk is the last thing she needs. The other part of me would drive her to the moon if she asked with her hair combed like that.

Sunday 6/6/99

I spent all day Saturday in the garage making a brass doorstop on the little bench lathe. We don't need a doorstop. I held it to a thousandth anyway. Twenty-eight years of that, it's the only way my hands know how to calm down.

After church, which I went to alone again, I stayed and talked to Pastor Lund in his office. I told him I'm angry. Not at Marlys. At whatever this is. At the lights, at Norma's group, at the hypnotist, at myself for not being able to fix one single thing. I told him some nights I lie there and think, I want my wife back, and then I feel like a heel because she's right there in the next room.

He's a young fellow, Pastor Lund, maybe thirty-five. He didn't give me a Bible verse. He said, "Frank, you don't have to agree with her to stay with her. Love isn't agreeing." Then he said he'd come by and see her if she'd let him. She won't. But he offered.

Sunday 5/16/99

Kristin and Ella came down for Mother's Day weekend. Brent had to work. Ella is six months old and sits up by herself and grabs your glasses right off your face and laughs about it.

Marlys stayed in bed most of Saturday. She came out for supper and held the baby for a while at the table and then handed her back and went and lay down again. On Sunday she opened her card and cried.

Out in the driveway before they left for the airport, Kristin sat in the rental car with the door open and cried too. She said, "Dad, she needs a doctor. Not for the UFO stuff. For this." I said I know, honey. I said I've been trying. She said, "Try harder," and then she said, "I'm sorry, that's not fair," and it wasn't, and it was.

Sunday 4/25/99

That school in Colorado. Marlys had it on from Tuesday afternoon until I turned it off Thursday night. She cried for those kids like they were hers. Then she went back to bed.

Her friend Joanne from church came by yesterday for the third Saturday in a row. They've played bridge together every other Thursday since 1983. Marlys hasn't been since Christmas. She wouldn't come out of the bedroom. Joanne and I had coffee at the kitchen table instead. She brought a coffee cake. We talked about the heat and the Diamondbacks and her grandson, and then she put her hand on my arm and said, "Frank, how are YOU?" and I had to get up and look out the window at nothing.

Marlys doesn't answer the phone anymore. She doesn't go to the store. She doesn't go to the mailbox. She used to know every person on this street by their dog's name.

Thursday 3/25/99

I used the card. The one Dr. Hale gave me last September, the one she tore in half, that I taped back together and kept in my wallet. I called and made an appointment with the psychiatrist, Dr. Ansel. Today at 2:00.

I told Marlys last night. I said I'll drive you, I'll sit in the waiting room, you don't have to say one word about the lights if you don't want to, just tell him you can't sleep. She said she'd think about it.

At 1:15 today I was in the truck with the engine running and the air on. She came to the front door in her robe and stood there behind the screen and shook her head. I waited ten minutes. Then I turned the truck off and went in and called and canceled. The girl on the phone was nice about it. She said it happens a lot. I believe her.

NATO started bombing Yugoslavia yesterday. It was on every channel. I didn't care. God forgive me, I didn't care one bit.

Sunday 3/14/99

Two years last night. Saturday the 13th.

She sat out in the yard all night. I mean all night, from dark till the sky went gray over the Superstitions. I sat with her in the other lawn chair with the thermos and the Army blanket, same as last year. Last year she held my hand. This year she didn't talk to me at all. She just watched.

At about five-thirty she said, "They didn't come." I've been going over that for a day now, the way she said it. I can't tell whether she was relieved or disappointed. I don't think she could tell either. That's what scares me. Not the lights. That.

Saturday 2/20/99

Marlys has taken a leave from Dr. Beck's office. Sixteen years at that front desk. She's been making mistakes, double-booking, forgetting to call people back, and last week she started crying at the desk in front of a patient and couldn't stop. Dr. Beck called me himself. He was very kind. He said, "Take all the time you need, her chair will be there." I don't know if that's true. It was kind of him to say.

So now she's home all day. So am I. You'd think that would be company. She stays in the bedroom with the curtains shut and the TV on low and I stay in the garage or at this computer. We pass in the kitchen like two people in a boarding house.

Sunday 1/31/99

Broncos won again. I watched it by myself with a bag of chips. Kristin called at halftime from Denver, the whole city was honking, and she held the phone up to the window so I could hear.

Marlys was in the bedroom. She's in the bedroom a lot since Christmas. She skipped her bridge club again this week, and she skipped church again, and when Joanne called she had me say she had a cold.

She hasn't talked about the lights much lately, which you'd think I would be glad about. I'm not. At least when she talked about them she was talking. Now she just lies there. I'm a machinist, I know the difference between a machine that's making a noise and a machine that's stopped. The stopped one is worse.