Walter said it after I had washed the meatloaf plates and set them in the drying rack. I remember the small domestic ordinariness of it, the smell of dish soap still on my hands, the faint hum of the refrigerator, the way the kitchen looked exactly as it had looked for thirty-nine years. He stayed at the table instead of moving to his recliner the way he did every other night of his life, and his hands were folded beside the saltshaker as though he were waiting to sign for a delivery.
“I want a divorce, Myra.”
We had lived in the same white house on Pheasant Run Road in Harlo Springs for thirty-nine years. In six days our children were planning to gather everyone at the Rotary Club to celebrate our fortieth anniversary. There were invitations already sent, a cake already ordered, our daughter Kimberly fussing over a slideshow of photographs. But Walter, it turned out, had already chosen a different future, and he had simply been waiting for the dishes to be done.
“Is this about Denise?” I asked.
He looked at the dark window over the sink instead of at me, and that was all the answer I needed.
Denise Holloway had been the bookkeeper at Sawyer Hardware for eleven years. She was good with numbers and quick with the customers and generous with exactly the kind of bright public laughter Walter liked to collect around himself. Two and a half years earlier she had started joining him on supplier trips. Then there had been private dinners, and late visits to the house that were always about work, and explanations that arrived already polished before I had even thought to ask a question, which is how I first understood that something was wrong, because innocent people do not rehearse.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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