Chapter 11
Gilbert stared at the casket that would soon hold his wife. His mother had been awesome. Beside him, supporting him, but not interfering unless he asked.
He had wanted to have a special kind of relationship with Sally, but she had been always running ahead of him. Demanding her own way and getting angry if he didn’t comply with her every wish.
He shouldn’t have married her. He had been deeply attracted to her, infatuated with her, and had not seen how different they actually were. How incompatible. Or maybe he just hadn’t seen her true personality. The selfishness she displayed, her need to have all of the attention focused on herself. Her lack of character.
He still remembered the letter that she’d gotten almost exactly four years prior.
He’d been opening the mail, and hadn’t even noticed that it was addressed only to her, but had gone ahead and opened it, without thinking. After all, he didn’t think there were any secrets in his marriage.
Boy, had he been wrong.
Taking a deep breath, he walked to the window in the small room that held the caskets for display.
He’d never been in a room like this. Were all funeral parlors like this? He didn’t know. He’d never been involved in the choosing of the casket. The intimate details of the funeral. Which pen would you like to use? What stationery would you like ?
He didn’t want anything fancy. He didn’t want a big show. It wasn’t because of Sally and the letter. Wasn’t because of what the letter contained or how that had changed his life, irrevocably.
They’d worked it out. He’d forgiven her, but he’d never trusted her again.
Maybe they wouldn’t have worked it out if it hadn’t been for his children. But he couldn’t look at his kids and not try. No matter how badly his own heart had broken.
Now, it was like all of that work had gone down the tubes, because he still ended up a single dad with three children.
Lord, how am I going to raise them on my own?
He had done as much work as Sally had with the kids, maybe even more. She’d taken girls’ days, spa days, PMS days, and had spent weeks at a time at her mother’s house especially when the children were small, and the work was never ending.
He picked up the slack, his mom had watched the kids any time he asked, and he’d been there with them every minute he wasn’t working.
He stared without seeing out the glass, thinking about how he’d wanted to have a marriage like God commanded. That had been his goal from the time he was young. But maybe he’d gotten caught up in seeing how a woman looked, her hair, her face, the curve of her waist, the flare of her hips, and more. Sally had that all. She hadn’t lost it with three children, either. She was just as trim now as she had been the day they were married. Oh, she did say she gained weight, and maybe she had, but she was still beautiful, fit, and trim. Of course, she went to the gym three times a week religiously.
He often wondered if maybe there was something going on there. He hadn’t thought anything like that before the letter, then after, he’d wondered. Were there more?
He supposed part of the fault was his. He had trouble being interested in his wife since he found out she’d been unfaithful. He tried. She apologized, and he forgave her, and they’d gone to some counseling sessions, but she refused to take responsibility and blamed him for the most part. Maybe it was his fault. He felt like he twisted himself into pretzels trying to be the man that she wanted him to be, and he always came up short.
Did that make everything his fault?
Or was she too demanding? Her standards too impossible to meet, her desire to be loved by everyone overcoming her ability to stay faithful.
Sometimes he looked at Robert and wondered if he was really his.
He sighed, blowing out a breath and then walking from the window back over to the casket that he’d chosen. All of them were fine; he didn’t care. The funeral was going to be expensive, and it was going to wipe out the small amount of savings he had. He hadn’t chosen the cheapest casket, but he’d chosen this one, which had a few little fancy things on it that he thought that Sally would probably like. Even thought he’d long ago stopped caring what she liked, he made himself go through the motions. She wasn’t all that interested in him, and it didn’t seem to matter what he did, he couldn’t recapture that. She had told him that he had changed, that he wasn’t fun, that he was too wrapped up in his family and he ran to them any time they needed help, so he’d gotten to the point where he pretty much didn’t do anything with his family at all. He’d given it all up, and still she wasn’t happy.
And yet, who was here for her when Sally had gotten sick?
His family—his sisters, his mom, they surrounded him, helped with his children, cooked them meals, washed his clothes, cleaned his house. He noticed and had been thankful. Meanwhile, Sally’s mom had come a couple of times, then taken him aside and admitted that she hated to see her daughter suffer so badly, and she wouldn’t be able to help.
He texted her the day Sally died and told her that it would probably be her last chance to see her daughter alive.
It had taken a while for her to text back, and she told him that she would prefer to just remember her the way she last saw her. And then she gave him a warning, saying that was the way the children would prefer as well.
It had made him doubt himself, especially since Sally had said the same thing.
Seeing her sick hadn’t made it so that he didn’t remember her when she was well. It had made it so that he understood just how bad she was suffering. And whether there was love or hate in his heart, he couldn’t not be compassionate when a fellow human was suffering.
Lord, I don’t want to tell everyone what I know about her. I don’t want them to hate her, to think less of her, and I definitely don’t want her children to think that either.
Should he continue to hide it? Should he ever tell them?
He didn’t know. He’d kept the secret for years, because she’d repented to him and apologized, and he didn’t think she deserved to have her name dragged through the mud, just so that everyone could know how badly he had suffered.
Was he making the right choice?
He often doubted that. He envied the men who seemed to have it all together, who seemed to make decisions without thought, snap decisions that always turned out to be the right ones.
Of course, people might look at him and think he made decisions without struggling with them, but they would be so, so wrong.
He breathed out heavily again and hooked a hand behind his neck, shoving his other hand in his pocket as he walked to the coffin. It would be this one. The funeral director had told him so. That they would be taking it out of the showroom later .
He would prefer to see pictures. Prefer to choose it out of a catalog. That made it less real.
But it wouldn’t have made it less necessary for him to go through it all. He was her husband. He had to be there. He had to be a father to his children and somehow figure out where he was going to go from here, what he was going to do. One thing he knew, he owed a debt of gratitude to his family.
A second thing he was pretty sure of. He would never trust another woman. Or maybe, he would never trust himself to choose another wife. He’d obviously made a big mistake, and he didn’t intend to do it again.