The Lunch He Chose Over Me

The call I made instead

I scrolled with my thumb until I found Sue Dunbar’s cell. She had given it to me years back when our boys were on the same team, in case of the ordinary emergencies of raising boys.

She picked up on the second ring. “Ruth, honey, how you doing? They treating you all right in there?”

“I’m stable,” I said, which was true about my body and a lie about everything else. “Sue, I can’t get ahold of Dale. But I know exactly where he is.”

There was a little pause on her end. The kind of pause where a person who has known you a long time decides whether to pretend along with you or not.

“Okay,” she said. “Where’s he at?”

“The Hearthside. The supper club out on the old highway. Window table, the big one by the fireplace. He’s there with Charlene Tuttle.” I took a breath and my ribs let me know about it. “They go every Thursday. Same time. Same table. The whole town knows it but me is what it feels like.”

Sue was quiet again. Then she said, careful, “You want me to send somebody to tell him you’re here?”

And that was the thing. She was giving me an out. She was giving me the version where it was all innocent, where I was just a hurt wife who needed her husband told, and a deputy would swing by and pass along the message like a neighbor.

I want to be honest with you about what I did, because I have turned it over a hundred times since.

I did not send Sue to hurt him. I want that on the record. I sent her because for one year I had been the only person in Ashford acting like nothing was going on, and I was done being that person. I wanted my husband told, in the one place he thought was his and hers, that his wife was in the hospital and he had chosen his chicken and gravy. I wanted the town’s quiet, careful pity, the pity I could feel every time I walked into the co-op, to finally have to look at what it was pitying.

“Just tell him I’m here,” I said. “Tell him at the table. That’s all I’m asking.”

“I’ll go myself,” Sue said. And I knew she would, because Sue Dunbar had watched me smile through a lot of things too.

What I pictured while I waited

After I hung up I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes, and I could see the Hearthside as plain as if I were standing in the doorway.

I knew that supper club the way you know a place you got married near. Dale had taken me there on our anniversary for years, back before there was a Charlene. The dark wood. The stone fireplace they kept lit from October on. The relish tray they bring first, the little dish of pickled everything. The window table by the fire, the good one, the one you have to know somebody to get on a Friday.

I could see Charlene leaning in across it. She had a way of leaning in when she talked to Dale, one hand coming to rest on his forearm, that I had watched at two church funerals and a graduation and told myself meant nothing. I could see his phone lying face down beside his plate, because whatever that lunch was, he did not want the real world tapping on the glass.

And then I let myself see the door open.

Sue Dunbar in her deputy’s coat, damp from the rain, stepping in out of the gray. The hostess starting toward her and then reading her face and stopping. The room going quiet the way a room does when a uniform walks in and does not smile. Forks stopping halfway up. Charlene’s hand coming off Dale’s sleeve like she touched a hot stove. And Dale finally, finally looking up from that table, the good table, the one by the fire, as a deputy he had known for twenty years walked straight across the room to him.

I did not need to be there. I had been the only one not in the room for a year. For once I got to be the one who was somewhere else while everybody looked at him.

I did not cry. Bethany kept checking on me like she thought I might. I just lay there and breathed as much as my ribs would let me, and for the first time in a very long time, I was not waiting for Dale to walk through a door.