I laughed. Through my tears. I couldn’t help it.
He took the shoebox off my lap. He put it on the floor. He took both my hands in his.
“Janet,” he said. “Look at me.”
I looked at him.
“Seventeen years,” he said. “You want to know what I think when I look at you in the morning? When you’re standing in the bathroom in that old blue robe?”
I couldn’t speak.
“I think, There she is,” he said. “That’s what I think. Every morning. There she is. The girl I spilled wine on. The woman who held my hand when the doctor told us about the miscarriage. The woman who sat with her mother for two years and never once complained. The woman who ate spaghetti four nights a week and made it taste like a party.” His voice cracked. “The woman who raised the smartest, most eye-rolling daughter in Ohio. That’s who I see. I’m not bored, Jan. I’m the luckiest man on this whole street.”
I started crying again. Harder this time. He pulled me against his chest and held me.
“You’ve got eleven gray hairs,” he said into my hair.
“You counted?”
“I’m a chemist,” he said. “I count things.”
So the question wasn’t Irvin anymore.
The question was Vanessa.
I lay awake for a long time that night after Irvin fell asleep. Thinking.
I thought about going over there and screaming at her. Telling her to stay away from my husband. Calling her every name I knew.
I thought about calling the police. But she hadn’t done anything illegal. Being a terrible person isn’t a crime.
I thought about telling the other neighbors. Making sure everybody on Willowbrook Lane knew exactly what kind of woman she was.
But every time I thought about it, I kept coming back to something else.
That box in her garage. With DUMP written on the side in angry black marker.
And the white wedding album with the gold letters, sitting on the high shelf in my closet behind my winter sweaters.
