She said she remembered the person, but not why he had been there. My mother traced the name with her finger and then asked me where I had found the document. I told her it was in the county records, and that the filing date made the whole thing impossible to explain away as a clerical mistake. She sat down and stared at the paper for a long time. Then she asked me whether my father had ever mentioned a man who worked at the church during that year.
I told her I had never heard the name before. She said the title beside it was something she hadn’t understood at the time because the man had been helping with several administrative things at the church. Then she corrected herself and said that wasn’t quite right. She remembered him being around before the wedding, but she couldn’t remember why he had needed to sign anything. I asked whether my father had known him, and she went quiet for several seconds before saying she thought so. Then she asked me to put the document away.
I didn’t. I asked her why the license had been filed eleven months after the wedding when my father had been overseas for most of that period. She said paperwork had been complicated back then and that I was looking too hard for something that might not be there. But she didn’t sound convinced by her own explanation. Then she told me there had been a period when my father stopped writing regularly, and she had spent several weeks staying with her sister. I had heard that story before, but never with those dates attached to it. For the first time, I wondered whether the gap in their marriage story had always been there and nobody had thought to call it a gap.
That evening, my mother asked me to bring the license back to her. She said there was something she had forgotten until she saw the name again, but she wasn’t ready to tell me what it was. I asked whether my father had ever lied to her about that year, and she said she didn’t know anymore which parts of her memories belonged to what she had been told. Then she looked at me and said, “Your father wasn’t the only person who was away that year.” I didn’t ask another question. I simply put the license on the table between us and realized that whatever the name meant, my mother had been carrying the answer for much longer than I had known.
