The Card My Husband Left Me

I stood up in front of the little white Methodist church on Second Street, the same church I was married in, the same church where I looked through my husband like a window, and I held up Harlan’s letter, and my hands were shaking just like they shook at the bank, and I told them the truth. All of it. I told them about the diagnosis and his father and the room above the hardware store. I told them about the passbook and the first of every month for six years. I told them that Faye Carraway was never my husband’s mistress, that she was a nurse and a Christian and the only person in this whole county who stood by a dying man, and that she had let them all think the worst of her for six years because he asked her to and because she was decent enough to do it.

And I told them that I had believed the lie too. That I had turned my face from a good woman in the grocery store. That I was asking their forgiveness along with hers, because a town is only ever as good as what it is willing to say out loud when it finds out it was wrong, and I was saying it out loud.

Loretta Simms was in the fourth pew. She did not have her hand on anybody’s arm that morning. She sat there with her mouth a thin line and her face gone the color of old paper, and when it was over she got up and she left out the side door and she did not go to the beauty parlor the next week, or the week after. The town, I think, had finally taken her measure. It took the truth to do it, but they took it.

Faye was not there, of course. She was two towns over. But the next Sunday I drove to that church and I waited in the gravel lot until the service let out, and when she came down the steps and saw me her whole body went stiff, braced, the way you brace for a blow you have taken before. And I walked up to her and I did the only thing there was to do. I took both her hands in both of mine, right there in the lot in front of her new congregation, and I said, “Faye. He told me. I know everything you did. I know what it cost you. And I am so sorry, and I thank you, and I am asking you to forgive me, and I am asking you to come home.”