I invited a lonely coworker to our Fourth of July cookout because I felt sorry for him, and three hours later he was standing in my backyard screaming that my husband had been dead for fifteen years. That is the short version. The long version is the one I have spent the last month learning myself, one piece at a time, from a man I thought I already knew completely after fourteen years of marriage.
My name is Aldona Kestrel. I am thirty nine years old. I have worked the front counter at the Sorrel Gap Feed and Farm Co-op outside Sorrel Gap, Kentucky, for going on eleven years, ringing up fencing wire and chicken feed and garden seed to the same fifty families who have shopped there my whole life. My husband, Fenris, keeps the grounds at Cedar Branch Baptist Church and does odd carpentry and farrier work on the side, and if you had asked me in June to describe him, I would have said quiet, steady, good with his hands, terrible at small talk, the kind of man who would rather fix your porch step than talk about his feelings while he did it. I would not have told you he had a secret so large it required an entire identity to hold it.
We live two miles outside town on eleven acres that used to belong to my grandfather, down a county road that turns to gravel after the second cattle guard. Every Fourth of July since we bought the place, we have hosted the same cookout. My side of the family. A few of Fenris’s coworkers from the church and the two farms he does work for. Whoever from our little Baptist congregation does not have anywhere better to be. It is not a big production. Folding tables under the maple trees, a smoker Fenris built out of an old propane tank, my sister’s potato salad, sparklers for the kids once it gets dark enough, and the flag my grandfather flew for forty years still hanging off the porch post. It is the one day a year our quiet, closed off little household opens all the way up.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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