A Message from God
By Jacqueline Doyle
Glenn woke again to excruciating pain. Over time it had shifted, radiating from his lower back to his entire left leg and foot, buzzing like static over radio waves. He hadn’t told Fay about it, hadn’t told anyone. He’d been thinking on it. He was wondering if it might be a message from God, and that wasn’t something you told just anyone.
It was dark, 3:30 a.m. maybe. He couldn’t quite read the red numbers on the alarm clock. Fay was still asleep, of course, curled into herself on her side of the bed. He could hear her inhaling and exhaling, not snoring exactly, but kind of huffing with long, satisfied snorts. Sleeping like a rock, his mother would’ve said. When Sarah and Glenn Jr. were little, he was the one who’d hear them cry out in the night when they were sick or had nightmares. Fay had slept through it all, would probably sleep through an enemy attack, if them Koreans or Iranians started a war. It would be all the same to Fay.
A few weeks into the pain, she’d noticed something—not his groans at night, but the limp he was trying to hide.
“By God, what’s wrong with you, Glenn? You look like a gimpy old man. Something the matter with your foot?”
“There’s nothing wrong, Fay.”
“There certainly is. You’re favoring your left foot. And why do you keep putting your hand on your back?”
“I’m going out to the garage now. Things to do.”
Her face tightened and she shook her head, clucking with disapproval. “Now isn’t that just like you.”
Time and again she’d told him he had problems communicating. Fay was a great one for self-help. She’d read some article at the beauty parlor, come home waving a checklist and declare, “We’ve got to do something about our relationship if we want to achieve intimacy and fulfillment.”
They were together, weren’t they? Coming up on thirty years, and he figured they had about as much intimacy and fulfillment as anyone else, leastways her parents and her two sisters, one of them already divorced. He and Fay didn’t fight—not rip-roaring fights anyway, like the neighbors across the street. Though it was true there’d been distance between them, since he’d found Jesus. Maybe longer, if he was honest.
This is an excerpt of “A Message from God”