not lying in the morgue. They could deal with anything if he was alive, right? “I’ve been out looking for you and was about to start calling hospitals. Why didn’t you come home last night?”
“Because I got married,” he blurted out.
“You did what?” Jody shook her head. Surely she’d either heard him wrong, or else he was trying to make her laugh so she wouldn’t be angry.
“We haven’t been doin’ so good the past six months. You know that, Jody. I want kids. You don’t know what the hell you want. I kind of had an affair,” he said.
“You did what? How do you kind of have an affair? Either you cheated on me or you didn’t. Which one is it?” Her voice shot up an octave with every word.
“The ranch foreman’s daughter and I—”
“You mean that teenager, the one I met at the Christmas party? Katy, or was it Kristin?”
“Her name is Kennedy,” Lyle answered. “She’s almost twenty, Jody.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you? This is not a joke?” Her hands trembled and her stomach twisted into a tight little knot.
“Yes, Jody, I’m serious. We’re on a weekend honeymoon right now,” he said. “She told me a couple of days ago that she’s pregnant, so I’m doing the right thing. We’re moving the trailer to the ranch. It’d be real good if you could get your things out by tomorrow evening. The movers are coming Monday evening to take it away. You can have the travel trailer. I can’t pull it with my motorcycle anyway.”
Her whole world was crumbling beneath her feet. She was going to drop into a deep sinkhole any minute, but he sounded like he was discussing whether they should put in ten or twenty tomato plants that year. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, but it happened, and I’m not letting my child grow up without a father like I did.”
Her coffee cup crashed to the floor from her hands and broke into dozens of pieces. She opened her mouth to give him a stinging tirade of cuss words, but nothing would come out. She was every bit as frozen as she’d been in the dream.
“Are you there?” he finally asked.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Jody. In some ways I’ll always love you, but . . .” He paused.
She could imagine him raising a shoulder in a shrug. A picture flashed in her mind from the Christmas party the year before. Kennedy, the daughter of the foreman on the ranch, had worn a tight red dress that barely covered her underpants. She was curvy, like Jody had been back when she and Lyle first started dating.
Jody hadn’t had a honeymoon, but then Lyle had declared that a marriage license was just a piece of worthless paper that the government used to make money. When she moved in with him, he was living in a one-room garage apartment. They’d lived there for four years while they saved enough money to buy a used trailer house and a couple of acres of ground from his aunt.
“How long has this been going on?” Jody’s knees buckled and she fell backward onto the sofa. This couldn’t be true. She would have known if he was having an affair. She was his wife, even if it wasn’t on paper.
“Since Christmas,” he answered. “We kind of got together out in the barn the night of the Christmas party.”
That’s when she hung up, and tears began to stream down her face like a raging river. She curled up in a fetal position on the sofa and cried until her sides ached, her head pounded, and there were no more tears. Her phone pinged, and she opened it to find two messages. The first one was from Mitzi, asking her if she wanted to join her and Paula for a girls’ night out that evening. The other was from Lyle.
She opened the latter and read that he was sorry, but he was happy and he hoped that someday she would forgive him. Evidently, tears could be replenished at the drop of a hat—or maybe in this case, the opening of a message.
Jody got a fistful of plastic grocery bags from a cabinet drawer and headed back down the narrow hallway. Like a bolt of lightning, it hit her—Lyle had to have taken money from their savings to pay for their little weekend honeymoon.
Strewing bags the whole way back to the living room, she started to cuss instead of cry. Her hands