The Man Who Slipped Away Each Night

The first night I did not think anything of it. A man has his habits. The second night I noticed. The third night I counted the minutes, and it was sixty six of them, and I hated myself for counting.

Because here is what you have to understand. I was not a girl. I was a widow who had been warned. Darlene Fisk’s voice was in my ear whether I wanted it there or not. They sniff out the widows. They come here on purpose. And the one small crack in my good days was that every single evening, at the same time, the kindest man I had met in six years got up from the table and disappeared into the dark, and did not say where he went, and did not invite me, and came back like a man with a cleared conscience, which is exactly, I told myself, how a man with a dirty one learns to look.

On the fifth night I asked him.

I tried to make it light. We were at the fire and I said, “Where do you run off to every evening, Walt. You got another lady friend stashed in cabin nine.”

I meant it as a joke. But I was watching his face when I said it, the way you watch a pot that is about to boil over, and something moved behind his eyes. Not guilt, exactly. But a door closing, gently, the way a man closes a door on a room he is not ready to show you.

“There’s just something I tend to in the evenings,” he said. “An hour. It’s nothing that needs to touch you.”

“I didn’t say it touched me.”

“No,” he said. “You didn’t.” And he smiled, but the smile did not quite make it up to the top of his face, and he changed the subject to the price of diesel, and I let him, and I lay awake that night in my little cedar cabin listening to the lake slap the dock and thinking that Darlene Fisk had been right, and I was a sixty seven year old fool, and I had let a stranger into the empty place in my chest and he was going to walk out of it with something, my heart or my checkbook or both.

By morning I had made up my mind. The next evening, I was going to follow him.

I am not proud of it. I want that on the record. I had never followed anybody in my life. I had never read Raymond’s mail or checked his pockets, not once in forty one years, because a marriage without trust is just two people guarding a border. But I was not in a marriage. I was on the fifth day of something I did not have a name for, with a man I had known less than a week, and I had learned the hard way, burying a husband, that you can lose everything you love in a single morning and never see it coming. I was not going to be surprised again. I would rather know.