The Card My Husband Left Me

I will not pretend I did not believe it. I believed it the way you believe the diagnosis you were already afraid of. It explained the quiet. It explained the back room. It explained three thousand dollars and “be well,” because that is what a guilty man does, he pays you off and he runs to the warm house with the insurance money and the younger woman. I went home and I took my wedding ring off and I put it in the drawer with the dish towels and I did not cry, which frightened me more than crying would have, because it meant some part of me had already died standing up.

For six years that was the shape of my life. Harlan in his room above the hardware store. Faye Carraway’s car on the Ellsworth road. Me on the farm with the dog and the Bible and the card inside it. We did not speak. I made sure of that. When I saw his truck on the square I turned down a different street. When I saw him once at the Dutch Kitchen, in the corner booth with his coffee, I walked back out and ate at home. Once, only once, we came through the doors of the church at the same moment on an Easter morning, and he looked at me, and I watched his mouth open like he was going to say something, and I looked right through him like he was a window, and I saw the words die in him, and I was glad. God forgive me, in that minute I was glad.

I tell you all this so you will understand what it cost me, later, to find out I had been wrong about every single part of it.

Harlan died on a Thursday in March, in the county hospital, of a heart that had been failing him for a long time. I did not know it had been failing. I found out at the same time I found out he was dying, which was a phone call from Pastor Dale on a Wednesday night telling me Harlan had asked, if it was not too much, whether I would come. I did not go. I will carry that. I told Pastor Dale I would pray on it, and I prayed on it, and the pride won, and by the time I had talked myself into getting in the truck the next morning he was gone. He died about the time I was pulling my coat off the hook, which I know now because Faye was with him, and Faye wrote down the hour, the way nurses do.

The funeral was small. I sat in the front pew because the pastor put me there, the widow who was not a widow, the wife who was not a wife, and I did not know where to put my hands. Faye Carraway sat three rows back in a navy dress with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, and I looked at her once and all the old anger came up like well water, and then I looked away, because a funeral is no place and because, under the anger, I was too tired to hold it anymore. Thirty-seven years and six, and here we both were, two women in a church over the same dead man, and I did not have the first idea what was true.