baby or whether someone’s husband had a lady friend on the side, I can’t even imagine. You tell me what you want me to think about your circumstances, and I’ll take you at your word. It’s none of my business to go guessing at what you’ve got under the carpet.
My mother and father, they taught me not to stick my nose in the affairs of others, and thanks to that I never felt as though it was a lie to let folks go on believing their presumptions about me or my family. Even my own children never knew I had a husband before Eddy. It seems like a different person’s life now, that for four long years I had a different name and lived in a different state, sleeping in a bed every night with a man who was not Eddy. Of course it was so long ago now it doesn’t matter one bit. Children assume so many things that it isn’t hard to make an old life go away. At one point in each child’s life, when they realize what’s possible, they’ll look you in the eye and ask, “Did you ever have a boyfriend besides Daddy?” And you shake your head no, and just like that it’s gone. None of them ever asks again.
I’d been so lonely, living in Maine. The house Harold promised me had turned out to be a trailer, with secondhand curtains that didn’t hang right. These days I wouldn’t care too much, but a new bride is picky about those things and she has a right to be. She’s making up a home. As it was, all the women my own age, there at our church, had babies already. When they met up it was for coffee and to let the babies play, so they never thought to include me. And then finally I was expecting, and for a while they included me some. I was embarrassed about my house, so I didn’t invite people over too much. That was a mistake, I suppose. It made me look inhospitable, but I didn’t realize that in time. I should have just bought some real curtains.
But then, before I got any chance to get to know anyone real well or fix the place up any better, the baby—my daughter Eve—was gone. After that I went back home to my mother and father, because I couldn’t take living among those women and their babies, nor with a man who thought we could replace Eve like buying a new dog. I couldn’t just come back to that trailer, pack up the baby things and get to work decorating as if a new rug and some wallpaper would ever cheer the place up. It was like that life had gone sour in the refrigerator, and there was no choice but to throw it out.
For years I hardly thought about all that. I’d cast it off, and it went away like it was supposed to. But then, once Candy got so concerned with her religion, started passing comments about true marriage and God’s plan for families, I felt the sour taste of my departure in my mouth again. I knew that if she really knew me—my own daughter—she would think I was a sinful person. I wanted to say to her, life isn’t so simple as all that. If ever there was someone who understands how hard it is some days to be a family, it’s the Lord. I kept quiet in spite of Candy’s ramblings, and I knew that in this life I’d poured all I had into the measure, and let the Lord fill up the rest of it with grace. That’s the main thing with her—she’ll spout off with her God-talk about rules and regulations and forget everything about the mercy. The whole blood-flow system she’s got all mapped out, with no heart at the center.
But even though I didn’t need for my children to know about my first husband, or about their lost sister, having lived inside that loneliness for so long made me anxious for my children to have better than that. Candy I wasn’t so concerned about, because she had that hardness in her that, for all its worrisome qualities, made me sure no man would break her. And as Cade came into his own, I stopped fretting over that for him, too. He had a big heart, but if he had a falling-out with a friend or got a snub from a girl,