The Call My Husband Never Ended

Word moves fast in a town of eleven hundred people. By the following Sunday, half our church knew, and not because I told them. Our pastor called me that week, careful and kind, and said only that he was praying for all of us, and that the congregation would understand whatever I needed from them, silence or otherwise. Most of the women I had known my whole life chose silence in front of me and something less generous behind my back, aimed at Merlin and Nolabelle instead. I found I did not need to defend myself to a single one of them. The recording had already done that work.

The bank placed Merlin on leave within the week, and the examiners who came through afterward did not like what they found in the loan files he had touched over the years, small things, favors called in, a few numbers that did not add up the way they should have. He resigned before they could finish the review, which in a small town is its own kind of confession. He does not work in banking anymore. Last I heard he was managing a farm supply counter two counties away, in a town where fewer people know his name yet, and where nobody looks at him the way half of Sweet Springs looks at him now, which is to say, carefully, and from a distance.