The Coworker Who Knew My Wife

The best day of the year

For eleven years, the Fourth of July was the best day on my calendar, better than Christmas, better than my own birthday, better than the first cool morning of deer season. My wife Nora and I hosted a cookout in our backyard every single year, and half of Delford, Missouri came through our gate at some point between noon and the last firework.

We live on the edge of a town of about nine hundred people, in a white farmhouse my grandfather framed with his own hands back before the war. Every summer I string paper lanterns and a couple dozen little flags between the porch post and the old hackberry tree. Nora hangs the same faded bunting off the porch rail that her mother, God rest her, used to hang, and she wears a red gingham apron with a burn hole in the pocket from a sparkler back in 2019.

I run the grill. That is my one job and I take it seriously. Brats from Hollis Meat Locker over on Route J, burgers I grind myself, corn still in the husk. Nora runs everything else, and by everything else I mean the entire operation. She keeps the kitchen moving, keeps track of whose kid is allergic to what, keeps my mother company on the glider, keeps the whole thing feeling like a family instead of a crowd. People love her. In a town this size, everybody has an opinion about everybody, and the only opinion anyone ever had about Nora Ackerman was that Tom got luckier than he deserved.

They were right about that. I did.

We had been married thirteen years by that Fourth of July, and they were thirteen good years. I want to say that clearly before I tell you the rest, because the rest is going to make you wonder, and I do not want you to wonder about that part. They were good years. She was a good wife. Whatever she had not told me, she made up for every ordinary day by being the best thing that ever walked into my life.

I just did not know yet that there was a rest.

The new man at the co-op

I manage the counter and the yard at the Delford Farmers Co-op, which is the feed and hardware store that sits between the Casey’s and the Methodist church on the one street we call downtown. It is not a big operation. Me, old Merle who has been there since Nixon, a couple of high school kids in the summer, and whoever we can find to run the loader and stock the back.

That spring we hired a man named Curtis Vane.

Curtis had moved to Delford in April, which by itself was strange, because nobody moves to Delford. People leave Delford. A grown man showing up out of nowhere and renting the old Pruitt place out on Tanner Road was the kind of thing the whole town talked about at the Casey’s coffee bar for a week.

He was maybe forty, lean, quiet, with a careful way of moving, like a man who had spent a lot of years not wanting to take up too much room. He worked hard. He showed up early, he never complained about the heat, he could stack a pallet of salt blocks without griping about his back the way Merle did. But he kept to himself. He ate his lunch alone in his truck most days. When the high school kids joked around, he would smile a little but he never joined in.