Linda Williams Facebook ad: “Sale Ends Tonight”

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My husband and I slept at his ex wife's house during a flood. We did it in her bed. And it saved our marriage. Last September, Bill and I were driving back from his mother's 80th birthday when the rain started. Not normal rain. The kind where you can't see the car in front of you and the highway turns into a river in twenty minutes. We pulled over twice. It got worse. By 9pm, the roads near our house were closed. Water over the bridges. No way home until morning at the earliest. Bill looked at his phone. Then at me. 'Sharon lives ten minutes from here.' Sharon. His ex wife. Married to her for six years before me. Divorced twenty years ago. They're civil. Christmas cards. Happy birthdays to the kids. She came to his mother's 70th birthday. Nice enough. But I'd never been inside her house. 'Bill, we are not staying at your ex wife's house.' 'Donna, the roads are closed. We're not sleeping in the car.' He called her. She said of course. Come over. Guest room is all yours. I sat in the passenger seat with my arms crossed like a teenager. 'One night,' I said. 'One night,' he said. We pulled into her driveway at 9:30. I checked my reflection in the visor mirror. No makeup. Hair pulled back. Wearing the oversized fleece and leggings I'd thrown on for a three-hour car ride to his mother's house. Sharon opened the door in a silk robe. Hair down. Smelled like vanilla. Of course she did. She hugged Bill. The kind of hug where her hand touched the back of his neck for just a second longer than it needed to. Then she hugged me. 'Donna, I'm so glad you're both safe. Come in, come in.' Her house was warm. Not just the temperature. Everything. Candles on the entryway table. Soft lighting. Music playing quietly from somewhere. A throw blanket draped over a leather chair that looked like someone had just been curled up in it reading. The house smelled like a woman who was expecting company even when she wasn't. I looked down at my fleece. The one with the coffee stain on the sleeve from this morning that I told myself no one would notice. Bill was looking around. 'Place looks great, Sharon.' 'Oh stop. I just like things cozy.' Cozy. My house is "fine." Hers is "cozy." She walked us down the hallway. Family photos on the walls. Her kids. Her new husband, who was apparently traveling for work, which is why she was alone, which is something I was trying very hard not to think about. She opened the guest room door. 'Fresh towels in the bathroom. Extra blankets in the closet if you need them. Make yourselves at home.' She smiled at Bill. 'Just like old times. Minus the arguing.' They both laughed. I didn't. She closed the door. I looked at Bill. 'She looks good.' 'Donna.' 'I'm just saying. She looks good. Silk robe at 9:30 on a Tuesday. Candles lit. Hair down. She looks like she was waiting for someone.' 'She was watching TV.' 'In a silk robe.' 'What do you want her to wear? A hazmat suit?' 'I want her to wear something that doesn't make me feel like I showed up to a job interview in sweatpants.' Bill sat on the bed. 'Donna, we are here because the roads are flooded. That's it. Can we just sleep and go home in the morning?' 'Fine.' 'Fine.' I went to the bathroom to wash my face. Her guest bathroom had a linen hand towel, a candle that had been burned halfway down, and a small vase of dried eucalyptus. My guest bathroom has a roll of toilet paper and a pump bottle of hand soap from Costco. I looked at myself in the mirror. Tired. Puffy. The bags under my eyes that never go away anymore because I haven't slept more than four hours straight in years. The fleece with the coffee stain. And down the hall, Sharon. In her silk robe. In her warm, candlelit house. Looking like she sleeps eight hours a night because she probably does. I hit menopause at 50. And I have not slept well since. The waking at 2am. You finally fall asleep and then you're awake again, and your hip is aching, and you roll onto the other side, and twenty minutes later that shoulder is aching too. By 3am you've turned over six times and you're so tired you could cry but your body won't let you stay still long enough to go under. Then the alarm goes off and you start the whole day on four hours of broken sleep. Make coffee. Go through the motions. Pray you can keep your eyes open through dinner. Fall into bed at 9pm. Do it all over again. I've been doing that for five years. You stop caring about things when you're that tired. Not all at once. But slowly. I stopped putting flowers on the table. Stopped lighting candles. Stopped caring what the bedroom looked like. The bedroom was just the place I went to lose the fight every night. I stopped wanting to go anywhere. Bill would ask if I wanted to get dinner and I'd already be on the couch in my robe by 5:30. He'd ask if I wanted to go for a walk and I'd make that face, the one where your mouth says 'maybe tomorrow' but your eyes say 'please don't make me.' Eventually he stopped asking. The closeness went too. Not with a fight. Not with a conversation. Just a slow drift. He'd get into bed and stay on his side. I'd get into bed and stay on mine. Some nights I'd lie there at 2am listening to him breathe, deep, easy, peaceful, and feel this wave of loneliness that didn't make any sense because he was right there. Three feet away. But it might as well have been miles. We hadn't touched each other in years. Not really. Not the way you're supposed to touch someone you've been married to for 33 years. He'd put his hand on my back when we walked through a parking lot. I'd squeeze his arm at his mother's birthday. But in bed? Nothing. Just two people lying in the dark on their own sides with a strip of cold sheets between them. He stopped complimenting me too. Not in a mean way. He just stopped. The only thing I'd heard in about a decade was the casual 'you look nice' on the way out the door. The one husbands say because they know they're supposed to say something. So there I was. Standing in his ex wife's bathroom. Looking at her linen hand towels and her eucalyptus and her halfway-burned candle. Looking at myself, exhausted, puffy, wearing a stained fleece, in her mirror. I came back to the bedroom. Bill was already under the covers. I sat on the edge of the bed to take off my shoes. I was going to scroll my phone until I fell asleep and get out of this house as early as possible in the morning. But I just sat there. My hand was resting on the bed beside me and I was pressing my fingers into it without realizing I was doing it. The way you'd pet a dog that walked up to you while you were thinking about something else. I looked down. It went in slowly. Deep. And then it came back up under my hand. I got under the covers. Lay flat on my back. The bed took my hip and my shoulder and held them, and my whole body just... unclenched. Like every muscle had been braced for the last five years and suddenly didn't need to be. I was asleep in minutes. I don't know what time it was when I woke up. But it was still dark. Still raining. And I hadn't moved. I was in the same position I'd got in. I hadn't turned over. I hadn't rolled off my shoulder. I hadn't fought with anything. I realized Bill was close. Closer than he'd been in years. He'd moved to the middle of the bed without either of us noticing. The room was dark. The rain was hitting the windows. And for the first time in years I was lying in bed next to my husband and I wasn't thinking about how tired I was or which side to try next. I was just there. Comfortable. My body calm for the first time in so long I'd forgotten what it felt like. He reached over and put his hand on my arm. I didn't pull away. I'm not going to say anything else about that night. But I will say this. It had been five years. Five years since I'd felt comfortable enough in my own skin to not flinch when my husband reached for me. Five years since lying in bed felt like anything other than a chore. Five years since I remembered what it was like to actually want to be close to someone instead of counting the minutes until morning. And it happened in his ex wife's guest room. Of all the places in the world. The next morning I woke up and looked at the clock. 7:45am. I'd slept almost nine hours. I hadn't slept nine hours since my 40s. Bill was still asleep. On my side of the bed. His hand still on my arm. I lay there for a long time. Pressing my hand into the bed. Listening to the rain slow down. I didn't want to get up. I didn't want to leave this bed. I wanted to stay in this exact moment for as long as I could. Bill woke up around 8:15. Looked at me. Looked at the clock. 'What time is it?' 'Almost 8:30.' 'I slept through the whole night.' 'So did I.' He looked at the ceiling for a second. Then he said something that almost made me cry. 'I forgot what this felt like. That was a night. And with the rain sound?' He wasn't talking about the bed. We lay there until almost 9. Sharon made us coffee. We sat in her kitchen being polite. I was counting the minutes until I could get back into that guest room and look at that bed. Sharon left the kitchen to take a phone call. I told Bill I'd be right back. I went into the guest room. Closed the door. Pulled back the sheet. The mattress was ordinary. Older than mine. On top of it there was a layer, thick, quilted all over in diamonds, sitting under the sheet where nobody would ever see it. I pushed my hand into it and it did the same thing. Down slowly, deep, and back up. I looked for a tag. Found one. Small company I'd never heard of. I took a photo of it. Then I did something I never thought I'd do. I went into Sharon's kitchen and asked my husband's ex wife about her bedding. 'Sharon, this is going to sound like the strangest question. But what is on that guest bed?' She smiled. Like she'd been waiting for someone to ask. 'My mother had the same kind when I was growing up. Thick. Heavy. You put your hand on it and you just sink. I spent years looking for one and couldn't find it. Everything in the shops now is four hundred GSM. There's nothing in a four hundred. You go through it in an hour and you're on the mattress.' She pointed toward the guest room. 'That one is a thousand GSM. A full kilogram of filling in every square metre. And go and look at the stitching, it's quilted in diamonds, not in lines. Lines let the filling slide out to the edges every time a body moves. That's why every cheap one you've ever had went thin exactly where your hip is.' 'That's the best I've slept in five years,' I said. She looked at me. 'Menopause?' 'Menopause.' 'Me too. I was the same way. Up every two hours. Couldn't stay asleep. And I want to be honest with you, it didn't fix that, nothing fixes that. What it fixed was that I was also fighting an eleven year old mattress all night. I don't turn over any more. I get in and I stay put.' Bill walked in. Looked at the two of us talking about bedding. Looked confused. Walked back out. Sharon said one more thing while I was getting my shoes on. 'Don't buy a mattress. That's what I nearly did. It goes on top of the one you already have.' I drove home that morning and went straight to the website. Small site. No flashy anything. Photos of it on beds, made up, half made, looking like somebody actually sleeps there. West Month. A thousand GSM, diamond stitch quilted, deep pocket that fits eight to twenty one inches, which mattered because ours is thirteen. Machine washable. Free express shipping. Thirty days to send it back. Forty seven percent off. I thought about the restless nights. The distance from Bill. The cold sheets between us every night. I thought about last night. Nine hours. His hand on my arm. His body against mine. I missed being the little spoon. I ordered it before I could talk myself out of it. My sister called while I was checking out. I told her the whole story. The flood. Sharon's house. The guest bed. Bill. She was quiet for a second. 'Donna, are you telling me you and Bill... at his ex wife's house?' 'Linda. Focus. I'm trying to tell you about the bedding.' 'Oh I heard you. But I'm going to need you to go back to the part about' 'LINDA.' She laughed so hard she couldn't breathe. Then she got serious. 'Send me the link.' I sent it. She called me back in ten minutes. 'I've ordered one. Also I want it on the record that your husband's ex wife has better taste than you.' 'She has good taste in bedding, Linda.' 'She had good taste in husbands too.' I hung up on her. It came four days later. I put it on our nine year old mattress, over the dip on my side I've been apologizing to house guests about for years. Made the bed back up over the top of it. Didn't tell Bill. Bill came home from the hardware store. Went to sit on the end of the bed to take his boots off. Stopped. 'What did you do to this?' 'Sharon had one. I liked it.' He turned red. Looked at the bed. Looked at me. 'Well. Good purchase then.' That night. Same thing as Sharon's guest room. The bed taking my hip instead of stopping it. I fell asleep at 10. Woke up at 5:45. In the same position. Bill's arm tucked under my neck. Second night. Same. Third night. Awake at 2am, warm, and I lay there instead of getting up, and I went back to sleep in minutes. That had never happened before. A 2am waking used to mean I was up until morning. By the end of the first week, something was different. I was sleeping. Deep sleep. Seven hours. Sometimes eight. The kind of sleep where you wake up and your body feels like it belongs to you again. I had energy. I cleaned out the kitchen pantry on a Wednesday for no reason. I put fresh flowers on the table. I started going for morning walks. I called friends I hadn't called in months. Bill noticed. He didn't say much. But he started coming on the morning walks. He started staying up later to watch movies with me instead of going to bed first. He started sitting closer on the couch. One morning I was making coffee and he walked into the kitchen and said 'you look really good today.' Not the usual compliment on the way out the door. He stopped walking. He was looking at me. Admiring like he did in our 20s. I almost dropped the coffee pot. I didn't do anything different. I didn't lose weight. I didn't change my hair. I didn't buy new clothes. I just slept. And when I slept, the spark came back. The energy. The desire to do things. Whatever it is that leaves your face when you've been running on nothing for years, it came back. I told my friend Maureen about it at lunch. All of it. The flood. Sharon's house. The bedding. Bill. The sleeping. Everything. Three other women were at the table. Every single one of them was leaning in. 'I haven't slept through the night since I was 49,' one of them said. 'I've spent hundreds on bedding. Thousands maybe. Nothing works,' said another. 'My husband and I haven't...' She stopped. Looked at the table. 'It's been a while.' Every woman at that table was nodding. Maureen said 'send me the link right now.' I sent it. She looked at her phone. 'Donna, it goes on top of the mattress you already have?' 'You replace nothing. That's the whole point.' Every woman at that table pulled out her phone. 'What's it called?' 'What sizes do they have?' 'Does it fit a pillow top? Mine's enormous.' 'Eight to twenty one inches. It'll fit.' Maureen looked at me. 'I can't believe your husband's ex wife is the reason I'm buying bedding right now.' I think about that night at Sharon's house a lot. The flood. The guest room. My hand going down into that bed. Bill's hand on my arm in the dark. All those years I thought the problem was menopause. That my body was broken. That this is just what happens when you get older, you stop sleeping, you stop feeling like yourself, you stop being close to the person you love. I wasn't broken. I was just exhausted. And I was exhausted because I'd been fighting my bed every single night for five years. My mom slept like a rock until she was 80. She had a thick quilted layer on every bed in that house. She never woke up turning over. She and my dad were holding hands on the couch well into their 70s. I spent five years lying on a nine year old mattress with a dip in it, waking up every two hours, waking up on the wrong shoulder, waking up alone on my side of the bed wondering where my marriage went. Now I get in and the bed takes me and I'm out in ten minutes. And last Sunday morning I woke up and Bill was already awake. Lying on his side. Looking at me. 'What?' I said. 'Nothing. You just look rested.' I smiled. Pulled the covers up. Moved closer to him. We lay there for another hour. Not talking. Not checking our phones. Just two people who found their way back to the middle of the bed after five years on opposite sides. My mom and dad used to do that. Sunday mornings. Coffee getting cold on the nightstand. Nowhere to be. I finally understand why. Your move.

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Sale Ends Tonight

West Month