There was a time when I thought patience meant keeping my concerns to myself.
I thought it meant understanding another person so completely that I never asked them to explain what they found difficult.
I had mistaken silence for kindness.
Maybe I had done it because I wanted to be easy to love.
Maybe I had done it because I was afraid that asking for more would make someone decide I was too much trouble.
After Dwight died, that fear took on a different shape.
I had already lost the person who had shared so many years of my life.
The thought of opening my heart again had seemed both hopeful and foolish.
I knew I couldn't prevent every hurt.
Still, part of me wanted to believe that if I was careful enough, I could avoid the worst of them.
Wendell had made me feel safe in ways I hadn't expected.
He paid attention.
He remembered the things I told him.
He didn't treat my memories of Dwight as an inconvenience.
Those things mattered.
They were part of why I had allowed myself to care for him.
But the house remained a question.
And now the garage had given that question a shape I could not ignore.
The yellow paper.
The photographs.
The date.
The ramp.
The paint.
I thought about them whenever I found myself drifting into assumptions.
Sometimes I imagined Wendell had been planning something kind.
Sometimes I worried that I had mistaken a private matter for an invitation.
Neither possibility gave me an answer.
I was tired of arguing with possibilities.
I wanted to talk to the man himself.
I didn't need to do it in a dramatic way.
I didn't need to raise my voice or demand that he explain every detail at once.
I could speak plainly.
I could tell him that I cared about him.
I could tell him that I had been trying to respect his privacy.
And I could tell him that I needed him to understand how it felt to be kept at a distance.
Those things were not contradictions.
I could respect his boundaries without abandoning my own.
That was something I had taken too long to learn.
I remembered a time when I would have waited for another person to notice my discomfort.
I would have hoped they saw it in my face.
I would have believed that if they cared enough, they would ask what was wrong.
But people did not always notice what we hoped they would notice.
Even people who cared.
Sometimes they were distracted.
Sometimes they were afraid.
Sometimes they had become so accustomed to keeping something private that they no longer saw how the silence affected anyone else.
I didn't know which, if any, of those things applied to Wendell.
I only knew that waiting for him to guess my feelings was not going to help either of us.
I needed to tell him.
The thought made me nervous.
It also made me feel stronger than I had felt when I was simply turning the questions over in my mind.
There was a difference between worrying about a conversation and deciding to have one.
The first left me trapped in the same thoughts.
The second gave me something I could do.
I didn't know exactly when the conversation would happen.
I only knew I would not keep postponing it because I was afraid of what he might say.
The holiday was approaching.
December 24 was no longer just a date on a piece of paper.
It had become a point toward which my thoughts kept returning.
I wanted to meet that day with an open heart.
I also wanted to meet it with my eyes open.
Those wishes belonged together.
I didn't want to spend the holiday searching Wendell's face for clues.
I didn't want to study every object in his garage and wonder whether it was meant to tell me something.
I wanted to listen when he spoke.
I wanted to be able to ask questions without feeling guilty for asking them.
Most of all, I wanted us to stop treating the subject as if it were too delicate to touch.
I had learned from grief that avoiding a painful truth did not make it less real.
It only meant I carried it alone for longer.
I had carried enough things alone.
That didn't mean Wendell owed me every private thought he had ever had.
It meant that if we were building a relationship, we had to find a way to talk about the parts that affected both of us.
I thought about the words he had chosen.
“For my Winnie.”
He had written them himself.
They had not come from me.
They had not been something I had asked him to say.
For that reason, they mattered.
They suggested that he had been thinking about me when I wasn't there.
They suggested there was something he wanted me to see.
But they did not tell me what it was.
I could be grateful for the words without treating them as a complete explanation.
That was the part I needed to remember.
A kind gesture could be meaningful and still leave questions unanswered.
A promise could be sincere and still require a conversation.
And love, if it was going to grow between us, would have to make room for both tenderness and truth.
I didn't want to turn Wendell into someone he wasn't.
I didn't want to punish him for being private.
I also didn't want to become a woman who accepted uncertainty simply because she was grateful to have someone beside her.
I had lived long enough to know that loneliness could make almost any attention feel precious.
But attention was not the same as being fully known.
I wanted to be known.
I wanted Wendell to understand that I had a past, that I still carried grief, and that my hope for a new life did not mean I had stopped needing honesty.
I wanted to understand him, too.
That was why I was willing to wait for his explanation.
I wasn't waiting because my questions didn't matter.
I was waiting because I wanted his own words, not an answer I had forced out of him before he was ready to speak.
There was a difference between giving someone room and leaving them alone with a decision forever.
I had given him room.
Now I needed to see what he would do with it.
The thought did not make me angry.
It made me clear.
I could care about Wendell and still expect us to move forward.
I could be patient and still have a limit.
I could hope for a good answer without deciding in advance what a good answer had to be.
That was the kind of balance I wanted to bring into Christmas Eve.
I didn't know whether Wendell had thought about the day in the same way.
I didn't know whether the date had a meaning I would understand immediately or one that would take time to explain.
I couldn't decide that for him.
But I could decide how I wanted to arrive.
I wanted to be honest.
I wanted to be calm.
And I wanted to be ready to hear what he had to say.
I thought about the yellow paper one last time before putting the question aside for the evening.
It had given me hope.
It had also reminded me that hope was not a substitute for truth.
I could hold on to both lessons.
Then I went on with the rest of my day.
Click here to continue reading: PART 16: As December Twenty-Four Drew Near, I Tried to Leave Room for a Good Surprise Without Letting Hope Do All the Talking
I Thought the Hardest Thing About Losing My Husband Was Learning to Sleep Alone Until Another Man Made Me Question Everything
Part 15 of 20
