The Divorce Papers He Made Me Sign

Peggy

My best friend Peggy Alcott showed up at seven with a casserole she must have thrown together the second I called her, because that is what Peggy does, she meets a crisis with a nine-by-thirteen pan.

“You are not sitting in this house tonight,” she said, before she was even all the way through the door. “Get your shoes.”

“Peggy, I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“I did not ask what you wanted. Get your shoes. We’re going to the IGA, I’ve got nothing in my kitchen, and you are going to push the cart so your hands have something to do.”

I loved her for that. Not for comfort. For a cart to push.

So we went to the grocery, the little IGA on the corner of Main and Third that has been there since before either of us was born, where the same families have shopped for four generations and everybody knows your business before you do. Peggy talked the whole way up the cereal aisle about her grandkids and the church rummage sale and whether the pastor’s wife had really said what everyone said she said. I pushed the cart and let her voice wash over me and for about ten minutes I felt almost like a person.

Then we turned into the meat section.

Steaks and wine

They were standing at the butcher case.

Dale and Tammy. He had a package of ribeyes in one hand and she was reaching past him into the cart, and there were two bottles of wine in that cart, the kind with the gold on the label that the IGA keeps up high and dusts once a month. Her hand rested on his forearm the way a hand rests when it has rested there many times. She was laughing at something. That laugh.

Peggy went stiff as a fence post beside me.

Dale looked up. He saw me. For one half of one second something crossed his face, and I have wondered since whether it was shame, but I do not think it was. I think it was the mild irritation of a man who has stepped in something on a nice day. He looked at me the way you look at a stranger who is standing where you want to walk. Then he looked back down at the steaks and said something to Tammy and the two of them moved off toward the registers as if I were a display of canned corn.

I did not say a word. Peggy wanted to. Peggy had a whole speech loading up behind her teeth and I put my hand on her arm.

“Not here,” I said quietly. “Not in front of the whole town. Let them have their steaks.”

We paid for Peggy’s groceries at the far register. My hands were steady. I noticed that with a kind of distant interest. My hands were perfectly steady.