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There’s a pop in the kitchen that makes Roger wake with a snork in his recliner. He blinks to clear the sleep from his eyes. The golf channel flickers silently on the TV before him, the glow of it rivaling that of the daylight now seeping around the cracks of the still-closed blinds on the windows. He’s covered in Carl’s throw blanket, a sure sign that his lover passed through here on his way out the door to the senior center for his morning swim.
His eyes sweep toward the kitchen, dark and empty. Carl’s not back yet, then. But Roger is certain he heard something, so he slams the button that sits his recliner upright and groans as he hauls himself to his feet. He shuffles his way into the kitchen and flicks on the light.
He grunts as his eyes adjust. The kitchen always makes him feel as if Linda’s ghost is hovering just over his shoulder. The set of ceramic storage canisters with the little geese on them still line the counter. The set of Cutco knives she’d bought from one of their daughter’s friends still sits in its block next to the stove. The cabinet knobs are painted with little blue hearts. She’d agonized over whether they should be hearts or flowers, and to this day he is certain she wished she’d gone with the flowers instead.
There’s the now familiar pull of grief as he scans the floor for signs of a mouse or something that would’ve caused the noise. He can’t bring himself to fully erase her presence from the house. Not yet. It feels… wrong, somehow, as if letting himself have the life he always wanted diminishes the life he actually had. The woman who spent fifty years at his side, who he cared deeply for, loved even, in a certain kind of way; the kind of way that had been enough until it so adamantly was not enough, and the self-loathing that came with that acknowledgement.
And now she’s gone, and he has the true love of his life at his side, and yet he still finds himself standing in the kitchen wishing that his last words to her had not been about toenail fungus cream. But that is the way of life, isn’t it? You find yourself in a thousand mundane situations with a person who knows every single disgusting detail about you, and you can’t even find the courage deep inside yourself to speak your truth to them.
His breath catches when he sees an unfamiliar bundle of papers sitting on the kitchen counter. He moves closer, his hand grabbing at one of the three pairs of reading glasses hooked over the front of his shirt. The bundle is actually bound together like a book with what appears to be hand-stitched string along the left side. The paper is oddly rough and thick, and the writing is a fluid, slanting font, almost calligraphy. The ink carries the distinctive quality of being written with a quill, where it gets dark, then progressively lighter, and then dark again when the writer dips the quill in the ink.
Roger frowns; the words are written in a language he does not recognize, and in fact, do not look like any language he’s ever seen written before. He picks up the bundle to examine it more closely and a loose paper falls out from the middle onto the counter. He glances down at it and gives a shout.
It is her handwriting. He would recognize it anywhere. Neat, precise, and always stick-straight, this is, without a doubt, a letter from Linda, written in what looks like blue ballpoint pen, a sharp contrast to the other pages, which he lets fall to the counter with a soft thud.
He picks up the letter with trembling hands, leaning against the counter for support as he reads.
Dear Roger,
I know this is a shock. Please don’t forget to breathe. (He sucks in a shuddering breath.) I will not bother to share the story of what happened to me or where I am now. You would not believe me if I told you. Suffice to say that while I am not dead, for your purposes I may as well be, because I am never coming back.
I know about Carl. (At this, Roger’s legs begin to tremble, too, and he is barely able to pull out a kitchen chair before they collapse underneath him.) I have run through many choice phrases that I would like to say to you about this situation, but if I’m honest, none of them really seem sufficient or even particularly helpful. I’m not even going to bother telling you how I feel about the situation, because that, too, seems irrelevant in light of my decision to stay where I am.
All I will say is this: I wish you could have told me then. And I genuinely hope that you are happy now.
This document serves as my official notice to you that our marriage is over and that we are both free of it. I tried to explain to my friends here that there is no mechanism for me to file for divorce from where I am, and even if there were, it would be a waste of time because it’s not like it’s possible for me to obtain my half of our assets. (Roger’s face twists up in confusion. Where the hell is she?!)
But one of my friends used to be a lawyer or something and he insisted on drawing up this document. (Honestly, I think he’s more mad at you than I am, and he wanted to let you know that he disapproves of you.) So here we are. I have no expectation that you’ll respond It is impossible for you to respond, but it is important to me that you please follow my wishes about the specific items of mine listed in section 2. You owe me that much, I think.
(At this point on the page there’s a rather dark splotch of ink, as if Linda had colored it dark intentionally or perhaps had let the pen rest on the page while she clicked it open and closed, a movement which he knew was a habit of hers when she couldn’t decide what to say. When she picks up writing again, the words are darker and more imprinted into the paper, like she’d been pressing down harder as she wrote.)
I met someone.
(Roger has to set the paper down on the table and press his palms flat against it to calm himself. He reads this sentence twice, then twice again. His chest feels hollow, and he doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t understand how Linda could have met someone else, but he does understand that this other person must be the reason that she has decided to stay wherever she is. He doesn’t understand why she didn’t contact him until now. He doesn’t understand why she didn’t just tell him she wanted out of their marriage.
He doesn’t know how long he sits there staring into space before he drags his eyes back to the letter.)
I met someone. I fell for him swiftly and completely. I fell for him before I knew about you and Carl. I fell for him without even a second thought for you. I fell for him and I would have made the choice to stay here even if I’d never found out about you and Carl. That revelation was simply the final blow to the long-beaten carcass of our marriage.
He loves me in a way that you never did. He is ten times the man that you are, both physically and otherwise. He loves me for me. (This is heavily underlined three times, the last line so hard that it made a small rip in the paper.) He loves me for who I am and not the charade that I will uphold for him.
(The handwriting over these last two paragraphs gets progressively messier, as if the words had been flowing out of her faster than her hand could write them. She’d written another sentence here, but it’s crossed out so heavily that there is no hope of being able to read it. When it picks back up again, her handwriting is back to its neat, precise self, and Roger suspects she walked away and came back to finish the letter after she’d calmed down.)
Anyway. Please respect my wishes in the contract. And please fix your relationship with Lindsey. She still deserves to have the father who loves her unconditionally.
Linda
“What the fuck?” Roger mutters. His eyes flick back over to the bundle of papers left lying on the counter. Curiosity gets the better of him and he scoots the chair so he can grab it without standing up.
He flips through the pages and realizes that only half of them are written in that strange language. The second half of the book is written in Linda’s hand, with a note at the top that she did the translation from this strange language that she refers to as “Common” into English herself.
“What the fuck?” Roger says again.
The first section of the contract is a rather long outline of all the reasons that Linda has the grounds to file for divorce. It is little more than a thinly-veiled character assassination of him, and while he takes umbrage at the hostile way it is worded, he is forced to admit that nothing written here is untrue.
He hears the hum of the garage door opening and closing followed by Carl’s entry into the house. Carl must see the light on in the kitchen because he appears a moment later.
“Hey Rog, didn’t expect to see you up– What’s going on?! You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“I think I have,” Roger replies as he hands Linda’s letter over.
Carl’s eyebrows shoot high up on his forehead as he glances at the letter. “What the fuck?”
Roger can do little more than shake his head as he turns to the next section of the contract. It is shorter than he expected, and so decidedly Linda that it’s as if he can hear her reading it to him.
Please determine if Lindsey wishes to have any of the following:
- The jewelry in my jewelry box on my dresser
- Her American Girl doll collection currently packed away in the guest bedroom closet
- Her Beanie Baby collection currently packed away in the basement
- Any of her old schoolwork documents and projects currently packed away in the basement
Any of my remaining belongings can be sold or donated as their condition allows. I wish for any proceeds of the sales of my belongings and for my half of our assets to be donated to an environmental charity. One of the good ones that is actually doing something to fight climate change. Ask Lindsey which one she recommends.
Roger raises an eyebrow at this last request to donate money to an environmental charity. He would’ve expected that she’d want to give her money to Lindsey, or donate it to the Humane Society or something. But he won’t fight this. She’s right; he does owe her that much.
Carl finishes reading the letter and sets it down on the table. “No, I mean really. What the fuck?!”
Roger shrugs helplessly as he looks up at him. “I… guess I’d better call Lindsey.”