Tenn and Lark

Chapter 13: What You Don't Know

In the three weeks following the fun night with Trisha's husband's revelations and Trisha showing up at the house and getting arrested, life had been quiet. Relatively speaking. My life at this point felt like a soap opera and I had no clue about which direction to go. I was becoming numb, with periodic surges of anger.

Leona and Janie kept me sane and distracted on the nights we met for dinner, and Dan was showing me what a family could be like. Dan listened. He listened to me pour out my pain when we met for lunches or dinners. He was never judgmental and he never responded in anger to the things that I told him Tenn had done the way that Janie and Leona did. Sometimes their outrage made me laugh and distracted me, but sometimes I didn't want the fury; I just wanted a sympathetic ear. Dan's ability to just listen soothed some of that despair eating away at me.

Dan also never told me what I should do, never told me what Tenn should have done or not done, nor did he come up with creative names or painful tortures for my husband. He just listened.

The evenings with him always ended the same. "Tell me about Marty," I begged him. "I need more stories about your wife so I don't lose all faith in humanity."

He'd shoot me a soft, sad smile and tell me another story about her. I'd heard about how they'd met -- he was a college student working as a waiter at an all-night diner and she was a student who needed caffeine to cram for a big math final the next day. He'd brought her fresh coffee all night long, and as morning neared, he'd brought her a plate of eggs, bacon and toast that she hadn't ordered.

"Don't worry about it," he'd told her when she said she didn't have enough money for that. "I've got you covered."

"And I made sure she gave me her number before she left the diner. I called her later that day to see how her exam went, asked her out to dinner, and the rest, they say, is history," he'd told me, smiling at the memory.

"I thought I had that," I said. "I thought Tenn loved me like that. That forever kind of love and devotion. Look at you, Dan. Marty's been gone three years and I don't feel like she's just a memory to you. I think she's very much alive for you, very much a part of your life still."

"She is," he said simply. "I still say good morning to her picture, still kiss her good night, still sleep on my side of the bed. Sometimes, when I'm missing her even more than usual, I put pillows down her side of the bed, spray them with her perfume and sleep against them like she's still here. Maybe I'm just a crazy man."

I shook my head. "No. I think you're just a man who loves his wife like crazy. And I'd be lying if I told you I didn't envy that kind of enduring love because I do. I wanted a man who loved me like you love Marty, and I thought I had one...but I was wrong."

His eyes held a faraway look. "I still talk to Marty out loud, pretending she's just in the next room and can't hear what I said. Sometimes I see her shadow out of the corner of my eye and try to turn fast enough to see her -- but she's always gone. For the first year after I lost her, I'd see her everywhere. I can't tell you how many women I followed in the grocery aisles because they held themselves like my Marty did or because they reached up for food on the top shelves the same way she did or had the same mannerisms she did. She was everywhere around me and nowhere to be found."

"I can't imagine," I said quietly.

Dan looked at me disbelievingly. "Can't you? You've lost your husband."

"Not in the same way," I protested. "I can't even begin to compare my loss to yours."

"Oh, the grief-o-meter game," he mused.

"The what?"

"The grief-o-meter," he repeated. "Where you compare grief to see who has the most right to it or to say there's people with worse grief so you really shouldn't be feeling as bad as you do. I've known him longer than you so my grief is worse. Your wife died, but my husband only cheated, so your grief is worse. That kind of thing."