He said her name twice, like he was making sure I understood it, and then he told me where she had lived in 1989. I knew the street immediately because it was the first place my husband took me after we moved, before we bought our house, before we had children, before I knew enough about him to notice what he wasn’t saying. I asked the man who she was, and he said she had been waiting for my husband to come back for thirty-five years. I told him my husband had come back to me every night, that we’d been married for thirty-two years, and that he hadn’t been seeing anybody. He said, very quietly, “That’s not what I mean.” Then he asked if I remembered the summer we moved, and whether I remembered the little girl who used to ride her bicycle past our apartment every afternoon.
I didn’t remember a little girl, but I remembered something else. The first month after we moved, my husband had made me promise never to give our new address to anyone from Paducah. I thought it was because he was angry about leaving his job, and I never questioned it because he was unusually tense for a few months afterward. The man told me that in 1989 my husband hadn’t been transferred at all. He had disappeared from Paducah after someone had found out about a relationship he’d been keeping secret, and the woman he’d left behind had a child. I told him my husband had never had another child. He stared at me for a long moment and said, “That’s what he told you.” Then he opened a folder he’d brought with him, and inside was a photocopy of a hospital record from that summer with my husband’s name on it.
I couldn’t make myself touch it. The date was three days before we moved, and the father’s name had been handwritten on the form in a way that looked unmistakably like my husband’s writing. But the child’s name was different from anything I’d ever heard, and beside the mother’s name was the same woman’s name he’d just given me. I asked him why he had this, and he said because my husband had given it to him in 1991 with one instruction: if anything ever happened to him, make sure his wife found out the truth. I asked why he waited until the funeral. He said my husband had called him two months before he died and told him he was finally going to tell me. Then the man reached into the folder again and handed me one more page. It was a letter dated three days before my husband died, and the first line said, “She deserves to know what I did in 1989.”
