PART5: She Stole My Husband, Then Asked Me to Read His Letter

PART5

She pressed both hands against her purse. “All these Tuesdays?”

“All of them.”

The room carried on around us. Numbers were called. Daubers struck paper. At table six, neither of us played.

“Why didn’t you say something?” she asked.

“At first, I wanted to know what became of you. After that, I wasn’t sure.”

“You let me call you an angel.”

“I let you call me June.”

Her mouth tightened, and for one sharp second I saw the younger woman in her, not because she looked young, but because she seemed ready to defend herself. Then it passed.

“I stole your answer,” she said.

“You stole my chance to give one.”

That was the difference, and I needed her to hear it. I could not say I would have taken Ray back. I had been hurt and furious, and by then I had started learning how to live without him. Perhaps I would have refused. Perhaps I would have agreed to meet him. The letter did not give me a lost happy ending. It gave me a decision I should have been allowed to make.

Delores bent over the closed purse. “I was afraid he’d leave me.”

“He did leave you.”

“I know.”

“And taking this changed nothing except what I believed about myself.”

She nodded once. “I know that too.”

I wanted to tell her she did not know. She could not know what it had been like to wait for a call that never came, then force myself to stop waiting. She could not know how carefully I had packed away every good memory of Ray because I thought none of it had meant enough for him to turn back.

But she did know something about waiting. She had spent forty years carrying the proof of what she had done, and she had spent most of her week alone. That did not settle the debt. It simply made her a person instead of the shape I had blamed in my head.

“Can you forgive me?” she asked.

I looked at Ray’s letter between my hands. “Not because you ask me at a bingo table. Not tonight.”

“I understand.”

“No, Delores. I don’t think either of us understands yet.”

The coordinator came over and asked whether we needed help. I said we were finished for the evening. Delores did not object.

I put the letter in my own purse. She heard the clasp close.

“It belongs to you,” she said.

“It always did.”

I drove her home because I could not leave her standing outside the hall waiting for a ride after what had happened. We barely spoke. At her door, she asked whether I would be at bingo the next Tuesday.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I won’t blame you if you aren’t.”

“This isn’t about what you allow me to do anymore.”

She lowered her head. “No. It isn’t.”

At home, I called my daughter and told her the answer I had not been able to explain before. I told her who Delores was, what she had confessed and what Ray had written.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “But I know something tonight that I didn’t know this morning.”

“Do you wish you’d gotten the letter then?”

“I wish I’d had the choice. That isn’t the same as wishing for a different life.”

My second husband was not a consolation prize, and my daughter was not part of a life I would trade away to test what Ray and I might have repaired. The letter changed the past I remembered. It did not make me want to erase everything that came after it.

This Tuesday, I returned to St. Rita’s. Delores was already at table six, her purse on her lap. There was an empty chair beside her, but I stood for a moment before taking it.

“June?” she asked.

I gave her my real first name.

She swallowed. “I didn’t know if you’d come.”

“Neither did I.”

I sat down and placed her bingo card between us.

“I can’t tell you I forgive you,” I said. “I can tell you I won’t lie about who I am anymore.”

“That’s more than I deserve.”

“Don’t decide what I give you. You did that once already.”

She nodded and folded her hands in her lap. When the first number was called, I read it to her and put the dauber into her hand. I guided it to the right square, but I made her press it herself.

I did not let her win. I did not punish her by making her lose. We played the card exactly as it came, with my real name between us and Ray’s letter where it had belonged all along, in my keeping.