How to Make the Turn

I lost my husband one morning in Costco as we were about to check out. I texted him, then called, then saw him looking for me. We had one of those, “I see you now; you’re walking toward me” conversations. I lost him again that evening when he had the stroke. And again, five weeks later, when his organs checked out one by one and he drifted away from us.

He stayed with me in the car for several months. I could feel his shoulder in the empty passenger seat.

It took me almost a year to build Costco back into my routine and when I did, I remembered to go wide on the turn off Memorial Parkway, as Jim had always instructed, hassling me about how I changed lanes too late.

“Will you just let me explain?” Jim said the day of his stroke. And so we sat in the car before going in and I let him break it down. “The only person who could hit you if you go wide early,” he said, “is some impatient bastard behind you, like me, who passes you on the right.”

He needed to get it out of his system, to leave me with a single paragraph in the unwritten instruction manual for a life without him. That and a bookmarked link for a piece in The Toast about how to buy a car without ever having to speak with a human, which I found after I totaled mine at a different intersection the following summer.