The Card My Husband Left Me

Three thousand dollars and “be well,” after thirty-seven years. I stood in the kitchen and read it and I felt something in my chest go from hot to cold, and the cold stayed. It stayed six years.

Do you know what a card like that says to a woman? It says, here is what you are worth to me now that I am done. It says, do not call me, do not come to town looking, here is your settlement, be well. It felt like being handed a tip. Like all those years were a meal he had finished and here was the money on the table and he was already putting on his coat.

I did not cash it. I want that understood. I put the three thousand dollars right back in the card and I put the card in the Bible and I shut the Bible and I did not touch that money for six years, not when the truck transmission went, not when the hail took the north forty and the insurance fought me for eight months, not the winter the propane bill came due and I sat at this same table in my coat doing arithmetic that would not come out right. I would rather have frozen than spend one dollar of what felt to me like the price he put on me. That is pride. I know it is pride. I am telling you anyway because you cannot understand the rest if you do not understand how hard my heart had gone.

Now I have to tell you about Loretta Simms, because the hurt had help.

Loretta ran the beauty parlor on the square for forty years, and a beauty parlor in a town like Verdon is not a place where hair gets done. It is a place where the town decides what is true. Loretta had a way of telling you a terrible thing with her hand on your arm and her face full of sorrow, so that by the time you walked out you could not tell if she had comforted you or gutted you. She got to me in the Dillons parking lot the week after Harlan moved out, with her hand on my arm and her eyes all wet with other people’s business.

“Ellen, honey,” she said. “I did not want you to hear it from somebody unkind.” And then she told me that Harlan had been seen. That his pickup was parked overnight at Faye Carraway’s little house out on the Ellsworth road. More than once. That Faye, a widow woman eight years younger than me with her late husband’s insurance money and a figure I had given up on in 1998, had taken up with my husband, and that the whole town knew, and that was why he left.