The Note I Showed Her in the Bleachers

None of that touched the real wound. The money was the least of it, if you want the truth.

The real thing was that there was a whole other woman. She had a trampoline in her side yard bought with my thirty years at the plant, and the two of us had never once laid eyes on each other.

That was the part I could not let lie. Not the dollars. The not-knowing.

He had kept us both in the dark on purpose. Each of us thinking we were the only light in his window.

So I quit thinking about courts and started thinking about Tammy. Did she know about me?

I was nearly sure she did not. And if she did not, then she was not my enemy.

She was the other half of the same lie, and she did not even know she was in it.

It was Kim again, bless her, who told me where I could find Tammy where nobody would make a scene.

“She never misses a Friday game,” Kim said. “Her oldest plays for the middle school team that scrimmages before the varsity. Top row, left of the press box. You could set your watch by her.”

I did not want a scene. I had been embarrassed in public before, and I would not wish it on a soul, not even then.

A ballgame is a public place, but it is also a kind of private one. Ten thousand people and nobody listening to the two women on the top row.

You can say a true thing quiet up there. The band covers it.

I am a church woman, and I prayed on it first. I did not pray to be made right, because I knew I was right. I prayed to be kept decent.

I did not want to come down off those bleachers having shamed that young woman or made a spectacle in front of her child. There is a way to tell the truth that lifts a burden off somebody, and a way that just drops a new one on. I wanted the first way.