I stood there beside the truck, reading the ticket twice. My hands were shaking, and I was
At the airport, I watched my husband kiss his physical therapist like he was nineteen again. He was supposed to be at his brother’s fishing camp. I heard him tell her, “Two more weeks and I’m out of that house. Then it’s just us.” For nine days I played the good wife. Then I drove to her address, and the door opened.I had driven my granddaughter Lilly to the airport in St. Louis that Saturday morning. She was nineteen, heading back to college in Texas, and trying to hide how homesick she already felt. Her mama had a double shift at the hospital, so it was just me and Lilly.
Bill said he would have come, but he had promised his brother a weekend at the fishing camp on Kentucky Lake. I didn’t question that. We’d been married forty-one years, and I was used to his fishing weekends. He still brought me the first tomato off the vine every July, holding it out like it was a diamond.
Two springs earlier, he’d had his knee replaced. A physical therapist at a clinic over in Evansville helped him get walking again. Her name was Christa. She was fifty-two, had a nice smile, and was patient with him. I baked her a pound cake to thank her.
After Bill’s therapy ended, he kept “running into her” at Walmart.
“Christa’s a sweet gal, hon,” he said when I teased him. “Don’t be silly.”
I let it go. That was my first mistake, though I didn’t know it yet.
At the curb, I hugged Lilly while she cried a little into my shoulder. I told her to call when she landed, and she promised she would. Then I got back in my car and started to pull into traffic.
That was when I saw Bill’s tan fishing hat, the one with the lure tucked in the band. I had bought it for him. He stood two doors down from me beside a red rolling suitcase, with his arms around Christa.
Then he kissed her.
I slid down in my seat and rolled the window down an inch. I heard him say, “Two more weeks and I’m out of that house. Then it’s just us.”
Christa laughed and patted his chest. A car honked behind me, and I drove off before Bill could turn around. I cried all the way home, two and a half hours, until my eyes swelled shut. By the time I got there, I had washed my face and put a roast in the oven.
Bill came home Sunday night smelling like his brother’s woodstove. He had a cooler of crappie he’d bought at the bait shop.
“Caught ’em myself,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek.
“Real nice, hon,” I said.
I fried the fish. For nine days I ironed his shirts, asked about his knee, and let him hold my hand at the fish fry. I hate admitting this, but I still laid his work shirts out where he could find them. It was easier than looking at him and asking what he planned to do to me.
Every night after he went to sleep, I took a flashlight out to his truck. On the fourth night, I found a folded delivery ticket in the console. It was from a furniture store in Evansville. One queen bed, one dresser, one rocking chair, delivered to an address on the north side. Paid in full with the card we used for groceries.
furious with myself for needing a piece of paper before I believed what I’d heard.
On the kitchen fridge, Lilly’s school pictures still hung under magnets, every grade from kindergarten up. Beside them was a garden club card in Bill’s handwriting, from our fortieth anniversary.
“To Earlene. Forty years, and I’d do it all again.”
I called my daughter on her break.
“Mom, don’t you go knocking on that door,” she said. “If he finds out you know, he’ll empty the accounts before you blink. Let a lawyer handle it.”
She was probably right. Maybe I was a foolish old woman, chasing something I didn’t want to see. But I needed to look at it with my own eyes before I let a lawyer blow up forty-one years.
On the ninth day, Bill said he had a VFW meeting. I waited ten minutes, then drove to Evansville. The house on the north side was a little yellow ranch with mums on the porch. His truck wasn’t there, but a brand-new rocking chair sat outside with the tags still on the arm.
My legs shook when I rang the bell. A dog barked inside, and somebody shushed it. Christa opened the door in a sweatshirt, her hair pinned up. She didn’t know me. We’d only met once, at the clinic, the day I brought that pound cake.
She wore a gold band on her left hand. Then she smiled and said, “Can I help you? If you’re here for my rocking chair, the delivery man left it on the porch.”
