PART 2: THE WIFE HE SAID WAS DEAD
“Same full name. Same date of birth.”
Bonnie said it gently, but there wasn’t a gentle way for those words to land.
I looked down at the certificate again.
Three years.
I had packed that man’s lunch for three years while another woman carried a piece of paper calling him her husband.
“Can I have the application, too?” I asked.
Bonnie glanced toward the office behind her.
“Let me see what came up with the record.”
She went through a folder while I stood there with the envelope pressed against my stomach.
Across the room, a young couple were filling out forms together.
The girl kept leaning over to whisper something, and the boy kept smiling before she finished saying it.
I turned so I wouldn’t have to watch.
Bonnie came back with another page.
“There’s an additional copy fee.”
I opened my purse and spilled change onto the counter.
A peppermint rolled toward her keyboard.
She caught it and set it beside my keys without a word.
The application had an address in Nashville.
A street I had never heard of.
A house number.
And a little box beside the words “Previous marriage.”
Jeremy had checked yes.
Below it, where the form asked how that marriage ended, he had written one word.
Death.
I read it twice.
Then I looked at Bonnie.
“I’m his previous marriage.”
Her mouth tightened.
“I understand.”
“I made him pork chops Tuesday.”
It was a foolish thing to say.
But it was the only proof of being alive that my mind could find.
Bonnie reached beneath the counter and brought out a chair.
This time, I sat.
The date he had written for my death was October seventeenth.
I knew where I’d been that day.
Home with the flu.
He had brought me soup from the grocery store and put a fresh pillowcase on my pillow.
Apparently, I had mistaken that for a good marriage.
My phone buzzed.
Jeremy.
Did you get those tags sorted, Jill-girl?
I watched the message until the screen went dark.
Then I put the papers back in the envelope.
“Do you need me to call somebody?” Bonnie asked.
I almost said my husband.
That was the worst part.
For eighteen years, whenever something happened that I couldn’t carry alone, he was the person I called.
“No, ma’am.”
She wrote her name and the office number on a small square of paper.
“If whoever helps you needs to ask about the records, they can call here.”
Whoever helps you.
I tucked it into my wallet.
Outside, the sun was bright enough to hurt.
I got into my car and locked the doors, although nobody was following me.
For a minute, I just listened to the engine.
Then I typed the Nashville address into my phone.
An hour and nineteen minutes.
My son, Owen, wouldn’t be home until after baseball practice.
Jeremy thought I was at work.
For once, nobody needed to know where I was.
I stopped for gas with the last twenty in my wallet.
While the pump ran, my lead called.
I let it ring.
He left a message asking me to report to the office before my next shift and bring my badge.
I couldn’t listen to it twice.
Halfway to Nashville, Jeremy called.
Then he texted.
Everything okay?
I pulled into a pharmacy parking lot before answering.
Got held up. Talk later.
He sent back a heart.
I stared at that little red shape.
Then I put the phone facedown and drove.
The address belonged to a small brick house with white porch rails and a ramp running alongside the steps.
There were tomato plants in buckets by the front window.
One of them had been tied upright with a strip of blue cloth.
Jeremy did that with ours.
Said wire cut into the stems.
I parked across the street.
There was no truck in the driveway.
Just a little silver car with a faded Vanderbilt parking sticker.
I sat there long enough for a woman walking a dog to glance at me twice.
Then I took the envelope and crossed the road.
I had imagined this moment all the way there.
In one version, I slapped her.
In another, she laughed.
In the version I was most ashamed of, I begged her to tell me it wasn’t true.
But when the door opened, all I could think was that she looked cold.
Lacey wore a gray cardigan over a T-shirt.
Her hair was growing back in soft, uneven curls.
She held the door with one hand and a dish towel with the other.
“Jill.”
She said my name like she had been expecting trouble, but not this particular kind.
“Hello, Lacey.”
Her eyes went to the envelope.
Then to my left hand.
I was still wearing my wedding ring.
“Does Jeremy know you’re here?” she asked.
“No.”
She glanced past me toward the street.
“What did he tell you?” I asked.
“About what?”
“About why he could marry you when he was already married to me.”
Her hand stopped moving on the dish towel.
For a few seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then she opened the door wider.
“You’d better come inside.”
The house smelled like toast and the lemon cleaner I used on Saturdays.
There was a pair of Jeremy’s work boots beside the coat rack.
Not boots like his.
His.
One had a pale streak of paint across the toe from when we redid Owen’s room.
He had told me he’d thrown them away.
On the wall above them hung a wedding photograph.
Jeremy in the blue shirt I had bought him for our anniversary.
Lacey holding a small bunch of yellow flowers.
He had his cheek against her hair.
I looked away before she could see how much that hurt.
“Sit down,” she said.
“I’m getting tired of people asking me that.”
“All right.”
She stayed standing, too.
I pulled the certificate from the envelope and laid it on the kitchen table.
Her eyes moved across it.
Then I put the application beside it.
I tapped the word.
Death.
Lacey went so still I could hear the refrigerator running behind her.
“Is that what he told you?” I asked.
“No.”
It came out barely above a whisper.
“Then what?”
“He told me you’d been divorced for years.”
I waited for relief.
Some small ugly satisfaction that at least she had been fooled, too.
It didn’t come.
“He said you kept his name because of Owen,” she continued. “He said you two tried to keep things friendly.”
“He sleeps beside me.”
She closed her eyes.
“He slept beside me last night,” I said.
“Jill, please.”
“No. You need to hear what friendly looks like.”
She pulled out a chair and sat down without asking me again.
I noticed a small plastic organizer beside the fruit bowl.
Morning pills.
Evening pills.
A folded appointment schedule held down by a salt shaker.
“The Tuesdays,” I said.
Her eyes opened.
“He said he was doing roofing work for a friend.”
“He takes me to treatment.”
There it was.
The parking stub.
The tired face.
The long embraces in my kitchen.
I had spent two days imagining motel rooms.
Somehow this hurt in a place I hadn’t prepared for.
“How long have you been sick?”
“Almost four years.”
“And he found you?”
“We ran into each other at the hospital. He was there visiting someone from his crew.”
She rubbed the dish towel between her hands.
“At first he called to check on me. Then he started bringing groceries.”
“He’s good at groceries,” I said.
She flinched, and I hated that I noticed.
“He told me he was lonely,” she whispered.
I looked at the photograph on her wall.
“He told me he was tired.”
For the first time, she looked directly at me.
Neither of us had anything to say after that.
Then she stood and went to a drawer beside the stove.
She brought back her phone.
“I asked him for proof before we got married.”
“What proof?”
“That the divorce was final.”
She scrolled with a finger that shook so badly she opened the wrong thing twice.
Then she handed me the phone.
It was a photograph of a document.
Our names appeared at the top.
Jeremy Lee Tolley.
Jill Marie Tolley.
And below them, words saying a divorce had been granted.
I had never seen that document in my life.
“That didn’t come from me,” I said.
“I believe you.”
She said it quickly.
No argument.
No demand that I prove the years I had lived.
Somehow, that almost undid me.
“Send it to me.”
She took my number and sent the photograph.
Then she sent the messages around it.
Jeremy telling her he understood why she needed reassurance.
Jeremy telling her he would never ask her to build a life on a lie.
I set my phone down before I dropped it.
Lacey put a glass of water in front of me.
I drank because my hands needed something ordinary to do.
“Did you know I still lived with him?”
“No.”
“Not even when you saw me at Kroger?”
She stared at the table.
“He told me you were having a hard time with the divorce. That if I approached you, it would make things worse.”
I remembered backing my cart into a display because I was trying so hard not to be seen.
All that shame I had carried home.
And Jeremy had let me carry it.
“I owe you an apology for what happened when we were young,” I said.
Her eyes filled.
“But I don’t owe him this.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t.”
My phone began to ring against the table.
Jeremy again.
Lacey looked at the screen.
For one strange second, we watched the same man call his wife.
I silenced it.
Then I remembered the insurance forms folded inside my purse.
“He says his company dropped his coverage.”
Lacey frowned.
“What?”
“In the spring. I was putting him on mine.”
She slowly shook her head.
“Jill, his insurance didn’t get dropped.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m on it.”
The room seemed to tip just a little.
She reached into her purse and pulled out an insurance card.
His employer’s name was printed across the top.
I thought of the extra money coming out of my checks for Owen and me.
The dental appointment I had canceled.
Jeremy saying we needed to tighten up until things got better.
Lacey was watching my face.
“He told me you had good coverage at the warehouse,” she said.
“He talked about my insurance?”
“He said Owen was covered through you. That it was part of your arrangement.”
Our arrangement.
I worked overtime.
He built explanations out of it.
I took a photograph of the card with her permission.
Then I stacked my papers carefully.
If I stopped doing small things, I was afraid I would start screaming.
“There’s something else,” Lacey said.
I looked up.
She had twisted the dish towel so tightly it looked like rope.
“What?”
“Last month, he asked me to sign papers about the house.”
“This house?”
She nodded.
“He said he’d found a place where things would be easier when I got weaker. Fewer appointments to drive to alone. Somebody nearby all the time.”
“Where?”
She hesitated.
“Lawrenceburg.”
I stopped stacking the papers.
“He said he was buying out your share of the old family home.”
The old family home.
My house.
The kitchen where I kept his Tuesday supper warm.
“He said you’d already found an apartment,” she whispered.
I heard myself ask, “When was I supposed to be moving?”
“Next month.”
My phone lit up again.
This time it was Owen.
Mom, why is Dad home?
I stared at the message.
Another appeared before I could answer.
He’s looking through your desk.
Then a third.
He asked if you took the house papers.
I stood so quickly the chair scraped across the floor.
Lacey stood with me.
“What is it?”
Before I could speak, Owen sent a photograph.
A thick envelope lay open on my desk.
Beside it was a page bearing my name.
And at the bottom, beneath a signature that looked almost like mine, was a date from last week.
The day I had worked a double shift.
Then my son’s last message came through.
Mom, Dad says if you call, I’m supposed to tell you I’m not here.
END PART 2….continue read next part below
