Salmonella Summer

By the time we got to our destination, my feet were swollen like a couple of sandbags. I hobbled off shoes in hand. My guts had turned to concrete somewhere between Dubuque and Salt Lake City. His mom met us at the depot in Bremerton and insisted I nap in the car while my husband and she shopped for dinner.

The house in Port Orchard was as small as I remembered it, a three-bedroom, one-bath cottage with a tumble down dock on the inlet clinging to a nearly vertical slope. There were two dead sedans in the yard and an overturned rowboat with a gaping hole in the bottom. His mom gave us a bedroom to ourselves, his brother and wife got the pullout couch, the two sisters shared a room and the other brothers camped on the porch.

His mom pleaded a bad migraine, so my husband and I cooked dinner the first night—chicken breasts sautéed in cream with mushrooms, which everyone enjoyed. Less than an hour later, a communal internal rumbling began and grew until six of us were outside projectile vomiting into the night air. We spread out horizontally in the yard to avoid puking on each other, like a demented lineup of cheerleaders at the pep rally before the big game.

We sent his older sister to the doctor the next day, as representative of our common affliction. Diagnosis: Salmonella. We were each issued personalized bottles of pills. It took a few days for the medicine to kick in. In between bouts we hosed down the yard.

“Annie, you know I don’t blame you for this?”

I pretended I didn’t hear him.

The week was a day/night blur of nausea, followed by trying to not get sick, offering God bribes, swallowing with great concentration, getting sick, washing up from being sick, feeling exhausted and taking a nap.

His mom cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday. Most of us skipped it, but not my husband. He never missed a meal, even though he’d lose it, literally, shortly afterward. Instead of talking to me about our future, he stayed at the kitchen table laughing with his mom, retelling old family stories, playing pinochle or jacks for hours. I sat very still outside in the sun hoping and not hoping he’d come out to talk.

My first grade teacher told me I should not actually sing; just move my mouth, when my class sang carols in the Christmas Show. I’ve been self-conscious and scared of speaking up ever since. I was miserable living at home after returning from college and convinced myself that marriage was the way out. Besides the road ahead always looked too daunting to travel alone.

“Are you going to move back in with me?” I rehearsed these words with slight variations at least a million times without saying them aloud. I didn’t want to hear what he’d say because either answer would hurt.