Rosalind Acker.
The woman from the Kroger. The woman I stole him from in 2002. Thin as a broom, scarf on her head, cart with nothing but ginger ale.
I stood at Winifred’s window and the floor did not fall out the way I expected, because the dates did something to my math. Married three years ago. The scarf. The ginger ael. The hospital parking stub. Vanderbilt. A woman loses her hair and drinks flat soda when the chemo will not let anything else stay down.
I did not understand it until I got home and made him tell me, and he told me all of it, finally, at the kitchen table with the pork chop grease going cold.
Rosalind came back to the county four years ago, alone, divorced, no children, stage three. No family left. The one person in the world she still knew was the man she had almost married before I took him. She did not come back for him. She came back to die somewhere familiar, and she had nobody, and Nathaniel found out, and he could not leave her to do it alone.
He married her for the insurance. His insurance. The coverage he told me he “lost in the spring” was not lost. He had moved himself onto a plan that would let him add a spouse, and the spouse he added was a dying woman with no one, so that her treatments would be covered and she would not die in debt and afraid. The Tuesdays in Memphis were the Vanderbilt oncology appointments. He drove her every week. He held her hand in the chair. Then he drove home and could not speak, and I put a plate in the oven and thought he was cheating.
It is bigamy. It is illegal. It is also the most purely good thing my husband has ever done, and both of those are true at once, and I have stopped trying to make them stop fighting each other.
He never told me because he knew what it looked like, and because he knew I carried the guilt of Rosalind for twenty years, and he could not stand to hand me the knowledge that she was dying while I hid behind a bread aisle instead of saying sorry.
I lost my job over a day off I took to uncover a secret that turned out to be my husband quietly paying a debt I was too much of a coward to pay myself.
Rosalind died in October. I went. I sat on the other side of the bed from my husband, two wives in one hospice room, and I finally told her I was sorry, and she was too far gone to answer, but she turned her hand over on the blanket, and I held it.
He is divorcing the dead, legally, now, untangling it quietly. I never left. How could I leave a man for the sin of being better than me?
I pick orders at a different warehouse now, farther out, less money. He still signs the grocery list Love you, Delia-girl. I keep the ones I can. Some nights I think the Lord did send me the bill, three years ago, and my husband paid it before I ever knew it was due.
