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“You should.
“His intentions were good. I believe that. But Jesus…”
“The whole thing is unreal. From start to finish.”
“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about any of it. What would you do if you found out that Natasha had kept something like this from you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not that she ever would’ve done that, but I wouldn’t have thought Mike would either, especially after how hard he worked to convince me to give him a second chance.”
“Why did you? Give him another chance, I mean.”
“He was so sorry, so remorseful, willing to take the full blame for it happening. He said he couldn’t even explain why it did because he loved me so much. I believed him about that, because whenever he was with me, that was all I felt from him. And I was pregnant with Tyler when it all happened, so leaving him was almost too daunting to consider.”
“I get that.”
“I loved him, too. So, so much. It nearly broke me when I found out he’d been unfaithful, but I really thought we’d put things back together. What do I know?”
“One of the things we see a lot in widow circles is people putting their late spouses on pedestals, as if we forget the things about them that drove us crazy and only focus on the good things.”
“Yes, that’s true. We wax poetic about our lost loves without giving a thought to how many times we had to ask them to take the trash out or why they thought they deserved a medal for taking care of their own kids.”
“Exactly.”
“What did Natasha do that bugged you?”
“She was so messy. I was constantly cleaning up after her. I used to call her Pigpen from Charlie Brown. She had a cloud of mess always surrounding her. And don’t get me started on her car. I called it the rolling Superfund site.”
That makes me laugh. “My car is pretty bad, too, but I blame the kids for the Goldfish dust ground into the carpet.”
“Her car was that way before we had the girls. It only got worse after.”
“What else?”
“She couldn’t get anything done. She’d start a big project, lose interest and walk away from it to start something else. We would fight about her taking on new stuff before the old stuff was done.”
“From the way you talk about her, I can’t imagine you fighting with her.”
“We used to have rip-roaring, screaming fights on the regular. We tried not to do that in front of the girls, but every so often, it would erupt when they were around. The thing was, though, we got over it just as quickly. I could never manage to stay mad at her, even when I wanted to. Did you fight with Mike?”
“Not really. I’ve always had a hard time with conflict. I had a screamer for a teacher in first grade, and that gave me so many stomachaches, my parents took me to doctor after doctor until one of them put it together with the teacher. Fighting and conflict make me sick, so I avoid it. With hindsight, that might not have been the best way to run a marriage.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Iris.”
“How can you say that knowing what you do about Mike having a whole other family?”
“That failing was on him, not you.”
“I must’ve done something—or not done something—to drive him to it. We had three little kids. I wasn’t always the most attentive wife.”
“It’s not your fault. If he wanted to be with someone else, he should’ve told you that.”
“But he knew how I felt about conflict. Maybe he thought it would be better to keep it from me for that reason—and the kids.”
“There’s no excuse for him being unfaithful, having a child outside of his marriage and letting you hear about that after he’s dead.”
“Where do you suppose she’s been all this time?”
