I opened the door.
He looked different. Tired. Unshaven. His shirt was wrinkled.
“Margaret,” he whispered, “I didn’t know.”
I looked at him.
“You didn’t want to know, Robert.”
He lowered his head.
“I thought because I brought home the money, I was doing the important part.”
“And what about everything I did?”
He swallowed.
“I was wrong.”
Then he reached into his pocket and took out my wedding ring.
“Please come home.”
For a moment, I remembered the young man I’d married thirty-eight years earlier.
But I also remembered twenty years of humiliation.
“I’m not coming home just because you finally learned to operate a washing machine,” I told him.
He stared at me.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want a husband, Robert. Not another person I have to serve.”
I told him that if we were going to remain married, things had to change.