The first Tuesday my husband ironed his own shirt, I should have known something was wrong. Royce has not touched an iron in forty years of marriage unless I put it in his hand myself and stood over him like a prison guard, and there he was in our bedroom in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, pressing a crease into a snap shirt he hadn’t worn since his mother’s funeral, humming something under his breath that was almost a tune. He smelled like the good cologne, the one I bought him three Christmases ago that still had two thirds of the bottle left because Royce Tanner does not believe in wasting cologne on a Tuesday.
“Legion business,” he said, when I asked where he was headed at six thirty on a weeknight with his hair combed wet and his good boots on, the ones with the little heel taps that click on the linoleum like a man walking into a courtroom. “Cleatis needs help with something.”
Cleatis Wray has run the Sapulpa American Legion post for eleven years and has never once, to my knowledge, needed help from Royce that required cologne. I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched my husband of thirty-nine years and eleven months back his truck down our gravel drive at a speed I would call, if I were being honest in a court of law, eager, and something in my stomach did a slow, ugly roll that I recognized from exactly one other period of my life, which was 1987, when a certain parts-counter girl at the John Deere dealership caused my husband to develop a sudden, passionate interest in replacing a perfectly good tractor battery every six weeks.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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