The Coworker Who Knew My Wife

The name I did not know

I want to stop here and tell you what those two words did to me, standing at my own grill with my own spatula in my hand.

Curtis screamed a thing that made no sense. A dead person. My wife, who was standing right there, alive, holding a tray. But it was the other word that went into me like a nail.

Danny.

Curtis’s name was Curtis Vane. I had hired him. I had seen his ID for the I-9. His name was Curtis.

And my wife had just looked across the yard at Curtis Vane and called him Danny, in the voice of a girl, in a voice that recognized him, and I understood in that one second, before I understood anything else, that these two people knew each other, had known each other from a long way back, from before me, from a whole life I had never been told a single word about.

I set the spatula down. I do not remember deciding to. I just found that my hand was empty and I was walking across the yard toward my wife, and the whole party was frozen watching me do it.

Nora saw me coming and the look on her face was the worst thing I have ever seen, worse than her stricken face at her mother’s funeral, worse than anything. It was not the face of a woman caught in a lie. It was the face of a woman watching a door she had nailed shut twenty years ago blow open in a storm.

“Tom,” she said. “Tom, I can explain. I need you to let me explain.”

And Curtis, or Danny, or whoever he was, was crying now, actual tears running down that gray face, saying her name over and over, only it was not Nora he was saying.

“Rae. Rae Ann. It’s you. It’s really you. Oh my God, they told us you drowned. We had a funeral. We had a funeral for you, Rae Ann. Mom died thinking you were at the bottom of the Current River.”

I made everybody go home

I am not proud of much from that afternoon but I am a little proud of this.

I turned around to my backyard full of the people I have known my whole life, my mother and my cousins and my pastor and the VFW guys and a dozen kids, all of them staring with their mouths open at the best show Delford had seen in a decade, and I said, in the loudest and steadiest voice I could find, that the party was over, that Nora and I were sorry, that we would explain when we could, and that I would take it as a personal kindness if everyone would gather their coolers and their kids and head on home.

And God bless a small town, because they did. There was some muttering, and my Aunt Fay had to be walked to her car by Denny, but within twenty minutes the yard was empty of everyone except me, and Nora, and the man I had hired to stack salt blocks.

I brought them both inside to the kitchen. I sat them down at the table my grandfather built. I got the man a glass of water because his hands were shaking too hard to hold anything else. And I said, “Somebody is going to tell me what is happening in my house, and you are going to start at the beginning, and you are not going to leave anything out.”

Nora looked at the man. The man looked at Nora. And my wife took a breath that seemed to go all the way down to her feet, and she started at the beginning.