When she told me, I had no idea. I'd never heard a word about the wedding where the bride was tarnished and expecting while the family sat stiffly in the living room. Plates of awkward cake on precarious knees, blank-faced and quiet while only the flowers were happy. I think it rained like crazy, or maybe I imagine that it did. It's hard not to add details, my mind requires at least the sound of rain to fill dead air like that.
It was well before my time, then out of nowhere this: one afternoon, the old and yellowed centerpiece of that bleak wedding told me how she prayed every night of her married life for her husband's desire to be taken away. As if she owed God so much penance that even 40 years of marriage couldn't fix things.
This is the kind of page that turns only once in a story but still explains everything that comes after.
I remember exactly where we were then, small chairs and a room suddenly grown still beneath the tick of clocks. I saw her eyes dart sideways as her fork came up, the dark metal of old back teeth just behind a fade of lipstick. Deep lines guarding tight pressed corners of her mouth but yet the words escaped and I thought, So.
This is what a secret looks like.