In recent months, Peter has been much sleeping later in the mornings, sleeping downstairs occasionally, getting up in the night to go to the bathroom and then going to another bedroom to finish the night.

Oh yes, I’m aware when this happens — Leslie calls it “using my mommy ears” — though I’m not necessarily wide awake.

In the wee hours one night I woke up and realized Peter wasn’t in bed and hadn’t been. The sheet on his side was cool and still smooth. I didn’t look at the clock, but I knew from the hush on the street outside that it was about about four. Just then the floor creaked. Peter was tiptoeing along the hall trying not to wake me.

When he opened the door, I asked where he’d been…as if he’d remember. “I just went to the toilet,” he said, climbing into bed.

“Um, no, you haven’t been here at all,” I said, but he was already asleep.

After sunrise I got up and headed downstairs for coffee. Whoops, what did I just see, I asked myself as I reached the top of the stairs?

I backed up and looked in Carolynn’s room. The bed was slightly mussed and looked as if someone had been sitting on it.  Then I peeked into Leslie’s room where the bedcovers were turned back, the pillow squashed. Peter’s slippers were placed neatly beside the bed and his winter jacket was hanging on the bedpost. “Hm-m,” I said.

Leslie’s bed was just right.

The coffeemaker’s drips woke my brain and I soon solved the mystery. The pillows on the sofa were piled up in a way that told me my husband had tried to sleep there using the cushions and his jacket for warmth. Upstairs, he’d first tried the bed in Carolynn’s room and decided it was too hard, but in Leslie’s room the bed was just right and he no longer needed his jacket for warmth.

When he finally came down, he sat in his chair — just right — and I gave him his coffee. I was tempted to offer him a bowl of porridge, but I kept that thought to myself. He doesn’t have a sense of humor in the mornings.

Header: Carolynn’s bed, too hard.

2016 National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ contest finalist.