“Because I know you,” she said. “And I know something changed. I’ve been trying to figure out what for months. Years, almost. And I can’t. So I’m asking.”
I looked at her. Really looked at her. Sixty-eight years old now, the same as me. Gray hair she stopped dyeing five years ago. Lines around her eyes that weren’t there when we met. The same directness that had drawn me to her all those years ago, still there, still sharp.
I could have told her then. The words were right there. I could have said, “I found the letters, Gloria. I know about you and Raymond. I know there was something before me and I know there was something after and I know you sat in the third row at his funeral because you couldn’t bear to be next to me while you were saying goodbye to him.”
I could have said all of that.
Instead, I said, “I’m not ready to have that conversation yet.”
She nodded slowly. Her hand reached out and touched mine, just briefly, just a brush of fingers.
“Okay,” she said. “But someday?”
“Someday,” I said.
I don’t know if someday will come. I don’t know if I will ever be ready. But I didn’t close the door completely, and neither did she, and maybe that is its own kind of truth.
—
The shoe box is still in the attic. I went up there last week to get the Christmas decorations, and I saw the corner of my mother’s suitcase pushed into the shadows. I did not open it. I did not touch it. I stood there for a moment with a string of lights in my hands, looking at that suitcase, and then I turned around and went back downstairs.
That is what moving on looks like, I think. Not forgetting. Not forgiving. Not resolving. Just choosing, over and over again, not to let the thing you cannot change be the thing that stops you from living.
I still have Tuesday dinners alone now. Or not alone, exactly. Renee comes over some weeks. Sometimes I go to her house and she cooks, which is a mixed blessing because Renee is a terrible cook but a wonderful host, and I love her too much to tell her that her chicken is dry.
Marcus comes up from Houston twice a year with the kids. We go to the aquarium. We go to the park. We sit in my backyard and I watch his children run through the grass and I think about how life keeps going even when you don’t feel ready for it to keep going.
Gloria and I still talk on the phone every week or so. Shorter calls than before. Less revealing. But she is still in my life, and I am still in hers, and maybe that is more complicated than a clean break would have been, but I have never been someone who does things the easy way.
If you’ve ever found out something about someone you loved that changed everything you thought you knew, I’d like to hear from you. Not because there’s a right answer. There isn’t one. But because some things are easier to carry when you know you’re not carrying them alone.
I am seventy-one years old. I have forty-three years of marriage behind me and however many years ahead of me that God sees fit to give me. I have a shoe box in the attic and a best friend who loved my husband and a story I have never told anyone until now.
And I am still here.
