PART3: She Stole My Husband, Then Asked Me to Read His Letter

PART3

The first Tuesday, she turned her face toward me and asked, “What should I call you?”

“June,” I heard myself say.

It is my middle name. It was not exactly a lie, and it was not exactly the truth, which fit our history perfectly.

“June,” she repeated. “That’s pretty. You’ll tell me if I miss anything?”

“I won’t let you miss a number.”

Women like Delores never really look at the wife. Forty years ago, I had been a coat in a doorway to her, something in the way of the life she wanted. Now she could not look at anyone. Every Tuesday, the woman who took my Ray held my hand for luck during the four corners game, called me her angel and offered me butterscotch candies from the purse she guarded like a bank.

I learned about her life after mine in pieces. You might think it had been a prize. It was not. Ray left her too, inside two years. They had no children. She had a nephew in Ohio who called on Christmas, and the rest of her week was mostly spent in a kitchen chair by a window she could no longer see through, waiting for Tuesday.

She told me those things gradually, the way lonely people do when someone keeps coming back.

One evening she said, “You married, June?”

“Twice. I’m widowed now.”

“I’m sorry. Was the second one good to you?”

I hesitated over my dauber. “Yes. He was.”

She gave a small nod. “Then I’m glad you had him.”

I nearly asked whether she had ever been glad she had Ray. Instead, I read the next number.

My own heart did arithmetic it had never asked to do. Some Tuesdays I drove home crying and could not have said who the tears were for.

Ray, perhaps. My younger self. Delores. My second husband, who had loved the woman I became after another man broke her.

My daughter noticed that I always came home tired after bingo. Once she asked why I kept going.

“The parish needs volunteers,” I told her.

“They must have other volunteers.”

“They do.”

“Then why does it have to be you?”

I folded the sweater I had been holding and admitted, “I don’t know how to explain it yet.”

That answer was closer to the truth. The sentence I would be nervous to post, even now, is this: part of me kept going because I wanted to watch Delores suffer. I wanted proof that taking Ray had not made her happy. Then she would reach for my hand because she could not find her card, and I would hate myself for wanting anything from her suffering.

Last Tuesday, the hall was loud, and we were between games when Delores went quiet in a way I had not felt from her before. She took my hand, not for luck.

“June,” she said. “I did one thing in my life that God will not forgive.”

“God forgives everything, honey,” I said, because that is what you say.

“Not this.”

Her thumb moved over my knuckles. The caller tested the microphone, and the sound snapped through the hall.

“There was a man,” she said. “I took him from a good woman. That is not even the thing.”

CONTINUE READING PART4…