Specimen: His Hands, Year Thirty-Eight

I watched you fail, today, at the lid of a jar. You who opened every jar of my adult life. You did not ask for help. You set it down on the counter, quietly, and moved to another task as if the jar had not happened, as if I had not seen, and I let you. That is the marriage — I let you. I opened it later, alone, in the pantry, with a tea towel and an old trick, and I did not call out look, look what I managed, the way I would have, young. There is a tenderness that has no words, that is only the not-saying, that is a wife in a pantry opening a jar in a silence she is building on purpose, so that you can stay, a little longer, the man who opens jars.