The town is Waverly. His father is there, in a memory care unit off Route 9, and has been since 2021 — the same father my husband told me died in Ohio in 2019, whose funeral I did not attend because he said it was “handled,” whose name I have not heard in this house in six years. The ring came off because his father still knows a wedding band when he sees one, and every time he saw it he asked about Karen. Karen is my husband’s first wife. She died in 2004. He’d worked out that if the hand was bare, the old man asked nothing, and the visit stayed a visit instead of an hour of telling a dying man that his son had remarried and that the woman he was picturing was twenty-two years gone. The woman texting him was a nurse on that hall. Your wife would understand less than you think was her guessing at me. She’d guessed based on what he’d told her.
I asked why the lie needed to be a funeral. He said it started smaller — a bad year, a diagnosis, a thing he’d tell me once he’d found the words — and then a month went by and the smaller lie stopped fitting and he reached for the one that ended questions. He’d been driving four hours round trip every Thursday for three years and telling me it was the Charlotte account. The cash was for the private room. He’d taken it out at an ATM up there so the statements would look like nothing, and they did, because I never read them, because there had never been a reason to. I sat with that for a while. Not the money. The four hours. Every Thursday for three years he got in a car alone and drove toward something he’d decided I couldn’t be present for.
I went with him the following Thursday. He didn’t want me to and I went anyway. His father is small now and mostly quiet, and he called me Karen twice, and I said yes both times because my husband’s face when he tried to correct him was more than either of us needed. On the way home I told him the affair would have been easier. I meant it. An affair has a shape you can put down. This was six years of a man deciding, over and over, that I was the kind of wife you build a false grave in front of. We’re seeing someone in Winston-Salem now, on Tuesdays. He wears the ring everywhere except that hallway, and I’ve stopped asking him to explain it, because I’ve seen the room. What I haven’t stopped asking about is 2019 — the year he came home from a funeral that never happened and let me make him dinner.
