…the grave he took me to in 2005?”
The whole living room went silent. Pink balloons. A diaper cake. Twenty women holding paper plates.
The older woman’s name was Linda. She was the mother of the young woman, Ashley, whose baby shower it was. And she was staring at me like she’d seen a ghost.
“Twenty years ago,” Linda said, very slowly, “I dated a man named Daniel. He told me he was a widower. His wife had died of cancer. He took me to her grave once. To ‘introduce’ us. The headstone said ‘Margaret Collins.'”
Margaret Collins was my mother. She died in 2004. My maiden name is Collins.
Daniel had taken his girlfriend to my mother’s grave and told her it was his wife’s.
Ashley had gone completely white. She was looking between her mother and me. “Mom,” she said. “You dated Daniel? My Daniel?”
It came out right there, in front of everyone. Linda had dated Daniel for a year, twenty years ago, when Ashley was five. He’d been “a widower” then too. He’d ended it suddenly. She’d never seen him again. Until three years ago, when her adult daughter brought home a “kind older man” she’d met at the gym. Linda had recognized him at once. Daniel had begged her not to say anything. He told her he’d “changed.” He told her he’d been through “a lot of grief.” Linda had stayed quiet, because her daughter was so happy.
And now I was standing in the living room. Alive.
“I’m not his sister,” I said, as gently as I could. “I’m his wife. We’ve been married for twenty-seven years. I’ve never been sick a day in my life. That’s my mother’s grave he took you to.”
Ashley sat down on the couch with her hands over her stomach. Somebody took the paper plate out of her hands.
I called Daniel from Ashley’s front porch. He was at “a client meeting.” I told him where I was. There was a very long silence. Then he hung up.
I filed for divorce two days later. My lawyer found that the house where Ashley lived, the one Daniel said he’d “inherited from his uncle,” had been bought with money from our joint account. The court gave it to me in the divorce. I let Ashley stay in it until her baby turned one, rent-free. None of this was the baby’s fault.
Ashley’s mother and I had coffee a few weeks later. We sat in a booth and compared notes on twenty years of lies. At one point, Linda said, “He told me your favorite flower was lilies. He said he put them on your grave every week.”
“My mother’s favorite flower was lilies,” I said.
Last May, on Mother’s Day, I took a bouquet of lilies to my mother’s grave. When I got there, there was already a small bouquet resting against the headstone. And a note, in a woman’s handwriting. “Sorry he used you. Sorry he used all of us. — L. & A.”
I left mine beside theirs.
