The smile and shrug that will linger forever

In early February, my wife sat in her wheelchair with a pile of gardening catalogs spread out on the coffee table in front of her. It was time to start planning her springtime plantings — which meant I would spend the better part of this day filling out order forms or calling 1-800 phone numbers to places like Breck’s, Heronswood Gardens, Burpee, Jung Seeds, Bluestone, Jackson & Perkins, SpringHill Nurseries.

I could feel the Master Card heat up from anticipation.

She had already studied each catalog over the past several days, dog-earing pages to mark plants she wanted, and now she held a Sharpie and circled each plant on the page, drawing a line to the stock number and price for me, so there would be no mistake when we sat at the kitchen table and she supervised me placing the orders, one by one.

Because strokes had left her with only one hand that worked — not her dominant hand — she switched between turning pages and picking up the Sharpie to circle a plant or draw a line on page after page of each catalog in the scattered pile.

Try it sometime and see how it works out for you. And then you’ll understand what happened next.

When she motioned me over to carry the catalogs to the kitchen table, I noticed that her Sharpie had strayed off the page during one of her circles around a plant. A 3-inch black line arced across the top of the coffee table.

“Hey!” I said to her. “Look what you did here! And that’s permanent ink!”

For the record, that old coffee table had bounced from house to house with us and is hardly what you might call fine furniture. Long ago, I painted the legs to hide the scars, but the wood-grain top was still in pretty good shape, thanks to Gail’s insistence on my using a coaster whenever I drank a cold, sweaty beer.

I’ve never been much of a stickler over flaws like beer rings. In fact, I’m a firm believer that it’s the blemishes of hard living that turn a house into a home.

But she always was a stickler over flaws like that. In fact, only a few weeks earlier she insisted I fetch the stepladder to get rid of some little fleck of dust or dirt that had found its way high up onto the wall in the living room. It was a dot — I swear to you — no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. But it was driving her crazy — and then she drove me crazy until I got the ladder.

Because for Gail, “almost perfect” was a synonym for “all wrong.” Everything had to be in its proper place — exactly. She was, I always told her, the Queen of the Quarter Inch.

Me? I’m the King of Close Enough.

There are probably products that remove permanent ink, but I had a point to make, because when you’re a shlump who’s been married 48 years to a perfectionist and you get the chance to nab a “get out of jail free” card to play the next time you plunk a sweaty beer on the table without a coaster, you grab the card and wave it with gusto.

“See,” I said to her, “you’re the one who’s always got me chasing after fly specks with a ladder, and now that mark is going to be there on top of the table forever. Just remember when you see it — that’s there because of you.”

And then she made that little gesture that always disarms me — that little half smile and tiny shrug of the shoulder. She couldn’t speak, but the gesture was eloquent enough: “Oh well,” it said.

It was a gesture that came at unexpected times. We might be sitting in a restaurant waiting for our food to arrive. Or we might be watching TV together and a commercial would come on. Or we might be idling at a street corner in the car, waiting for the red light to change.

Our eyes would meet, and apropos of nothing at all, she would give me that little half smile and a shrug. “Oh well,” it would say. “Life has brought us here, and now here we are.”

It was an astounding gesture, considering all her health problems — her heart surgeries, cancer surgery, debilitating strokes and maddeningly ineffective rehab and therapy sessions. I don’t remember her ever making that gesture before all those disasters happened to her, and maybe that’s why my heart would break every time she shot me that little “Oh well” smile and shrug.

But no, that’s not quite right. My heart wouldn’t break when I saw it. My heart would blossom. And every time, I would fall more deeply in love with her — even if I was miffed at her just a moment before.

She is gone now, felled by a catastrophic stroke on Valentine’s Day, just days after she planned her springtime garden and circled flowers in all those catalogs on the coffee table with a Sharpie.

And now, every time I pass by that coffee table in the living room, I touch that 3-inch arc of ink and remember my scolding words to her: “…that mark is going to be there on top of the table forever. Just remember when you see it — that’s there because of you.”

We sat at the kitchen table that day and ordered all those plants — lily bulbs, rose sets, seeds and more. They will arrive at my doorstep in early May, when the ground is ready to receive them.

I will plant them in her garden for her, even though she won’t be there to see them grow. And I hope I have the courage to do it with a half-smile and a small shrug of the shoulder.

Oh well. Life has brought us here.

And now here we are.

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