His children never believed a word of it.
Louise, his daughter, was fifty-one, sharp-jawed and sharper-tongued, the kind of woman who’d built an entire career out of not being told no. Roy, his son, was forty-eight, quieter than his sister but no less certain, in his own way, that his father had lost his good sense somewhere around the same time he’d lost his second wife.
They came to exactly one dinner together, the four of us, three weeks before the wedding. Louise spent most of it asking pointed questions about my late husband’s estate, my current living situation, whether I’d signed anything yet.
“I’m not signing anything, dear,” I told her. “I’m marrying your father because I love him, not because I need his checking account.”
“That’s what they all say,” Louise said, and Desmond had to put a hand on her arm to keep the rest of that sentence from finishing itself.
We married in June, at the same little church where he’d found me selling lemon bars five months earlier, forty guests, most of them people who’d known one or both of us since before either set of children existed. Louise and Roy came. They stood in the back the entire ceremony with the particular stillness of people attending a funeral rather than a wedding.
For two months, Desmond and I lived a kind of happiness I genuinely hadn’t expected to get a second chance at. He read the newspaper out loud to me in the mornings, complaining about things neither of us could change. I taught him, finally, fifty-three years too late, how to make my mother’s lemon bars properly, and he burned the first batch so badly the smoke detector went off twice.
In early August, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, Desmond had a heart attack while working in the garden and was gone before the ambulance made it halfway to Millbrook Falls General.
I had been married to him for exactly fifty-eight days.
PART 3
Louise arrived at the house before I’d even finished calling the rest of the family.
“Get out,” she said, standing in the doorway of the bedroom I’d shared with her father for less than two months. “You’ve embarrassed our mother’s memory long enough.”
“Louise, I loved your father—”
“For eight weeks,” she said. “You loved him for eight weeks, and now you think that entitles you to a house my mother picked out the wallpaper for.”
Roy carried my suitcase out to the porch and set it down on the boards without meeting my eyes.
“Please,” I said, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be. “Can I at least take his photograph? The one from the mantel, the wedding one?”
“No,” Louise said. “Nothing in this house belongs to you.”
I left in the dress I had, only two days earlier, quietly picked out to be buried in someday — dark blue, simple, the one thing hanging in my closet at the house that Louise, in her hurry to have me gone, never bothered to check whether it counted as mine or Desmond’s.
I moved into my late sister’s old trailer out along the county road, a single-wide she’d left me eight years ago that I’d never quite gotten around to selling. Desmond’s absence sat in that trailer with me every single hour, heavier than anything I’d carried in a long time, heavier even than losing Harold, because I hadn’t had fifty-eight days with Harold to still be counting.
Two weeks after Louise put my suitcase on that porch, I was outside hanging laundry on the line strung between two fence posts when I heard tires crunching gravel.
A black car, long and polished, the kind that didn’t belong on a county road lined with single-wides and propane tanks, pulled up right in front of my trailer.
A man in a gray suit got out, carrying a sealed envelope with my name written across the front in handwriting I recognized instantly, even from thirty feet away, even after everything — Desmond’s own hand, careful and slanted, the same hand that had once signed letters from three thousand miles away that I still had, folded and yellowed, in a shoebox under my bed.
“Margaret,” the man said, kind, careful. “My name is Franklin Voss. I was your husband’s attorney. He left very specific instructions for me to deliver this to you personally, so that you would receive exactly what you deserved.”
PART 4
