The bulb over our front door takes a half-second to catch before it holds, a small flicker like it needs a moment to decide, and some evenings, waiting for it, my hand still on the switch, I catch myself already knowing there’s no one left out there for it to guide home. I’ve turned it on every night for eleven years. For the last two, I’ve been fairly sure it isn’t for her anymore, and I still haven’t said so.
It started the years she closed the pharmacy three nights a week, back before they moved her to mornings. She’d get home well past when the rest of the street had already gone dark. The streetlamp two doors down has never worked. It’s been out since before we bought the house, and nobody’s ever called the city about it. I started leaving the porch light on, just that, something for her to walk toward instead of guessing where the steps were in the dark.
The bulb needs replacing. Been flickering for months now, and I keep meaning to grab one from the hardware store on the corner, the one that closes too early for anyone’s actual schedule, and every week I forget until dusk reminds me again. Not that a new bulb would change who it’s for.
She moved to mornings two years ago. Nobody decided out loud to stop the light. It just kept going, the way certain habits keep their own schedule long after the body’s stopped needing them. Or maybe it was never about the body. I couldn’t tell you which one is true, and some nights I think I’ve stopped wanting to know.
This isn’t something I’ve said out loud to anyone, including her: some evenings I’m not turning that light on for her at all. I’m turning it on because for one small minute at dusk, I still get to be the person keeping watch over something. I mean, it’s not only that. But it’s most of it. More of it than I like counting.
There was an evening in October, or maybe it was November, when I got held up at the sink and came around the corner late, and found her already standing at the door, her hand resting near the switch plate, not quite on it, watching the same stretch of street I always watch, like she’d taken over keeping the watch herself.
I’ve come back to that evening more than I’d say out loud. Was she just cold, waiting for me to get to it? Or had she known for longer than I’d let myself think, and simply decided, the same way I had, that some things stay easier if you leave the door pulled almost shut instead of fully closed or fully open.
Misunderstanding always sounded to me like a gap, like one of us standing somewhere the other couldn’t see. I’m less sure of that now. It might be closer to two people standing in the exact same spot, looking at the exact same thing, and choosing, separately, never to point at it. I’m no longer sure that’s a failure of anything. Some nights it feels closer to the opposite of one.
I don’t ask her about it. Whatever the answer is, I’m not sure either of us can afford to spend it yet.
It isn’t that she’d think less of me for keeping this going two years past its reason. I don’t think she would. The harder fear is that she’d tell me, gently, that she’d noticed the whole time and simply decided it wasn’t hers to take from me—that she’d been the one being careful with me, and not the other way around, and I never once noticed I was the one who needed it. My hands go still on the counter just picturing her working that out and saying nothing.
Tonight I’m slow to the switch again, caught up in something at the sink, and by the time I reach the hallway she’s already there. Her hand rests near the plate, not quite touching it, watching the same stretch of street I’ve watched every evening for eleven years. I don’t ask what she’s looking for. She doesn’t offer. The bulb takes its half-second and catches, the way it always does, and we stand there a moment in the small bit of light it throws, neither of us saying the one thing we might both already know. Her hand finds mine before it finds the switch. I let it. Outside, the street stays exactly as empty as it’s been for two years, and neither of us turns back toward the kitchen just yet.
