I said yes.
I was thirty-five. He was seventy-two.
PART 2
Five years.
I am not going to write about that marriage the way people want me to, because the version people want is either grim or saintly and it was neither.
He taught my daughter chess at that kitchen table and she is now better than both of us and has been since she was eight.
He sat up all night with me the time her temperature would not come down, in a chair by the door, not saying anything, just there.
I made his coffee the way he liked it, which took me about four months to get right and which he never once corrected.
And when he could not walk any more I took him round the garden in the chair, every afternoon, including the ones where neither of us said a word.
There was a long stretch in the middle — about two years — where I stopped thinking about the arrangement at all.
I have had to be honest with myself about what that means and I have decided it means exactly what it looks like.
