The Diner Off the Highway
Episode 3 of 3 of My Husband’s First Wife by Helen Abbott
She picked the place. A diner forty minutes out, the kind with a sign that only lights on one side.
I knew her before she sat down. Not from the photograph. The photograph was a woman with short hair in a gray coat, and the woman who walked in had hair to her shoulders, dark now, and a red jacket, and she was thinner than the picture in a way that looked like effort.
I knew her because she looked at the booth and then at me, and she did the thing with her mouth that I do when I’m about to be polite to someone I’m afraid of.
“Tessa,” she said.
It was the first time in four months anyone had said it first.
She sat. She didn’t order. Neither did I.
“How long did it take,” she said. “The mugs.”
“Day one.”
“The coat?”
“October.”
“The hair?”
I didn’t answer. She nodded like I had.
“December for me too,” Julie said. “He never asks. That’s what nobody understands when I try to explain it. He never once asked me to do anything. He just makes the other way slightly worse, every day, until you go to the better way on your own and you feel smart about it.”
“Why did you leave?”
“Because I found the box.”
She said it and then waited, and I understood that she was watching to see if I knew, and I didn’t, and something in her face went sorry for me.
“In the attic,” she said. “Behind the water tank. There’s a box. Clothes, mostly. A gray coat. Some photographs. A woman with short hair who looks a little like me and a little like you.” She turned her water glass a quarter turn. “Her name was Grace. She was before me. He told me she died, too.”
The diner was very loud for a second and then it wasn’t.
“Did she?”
“I don’t know,” Julie said. “I never found out. I found the box on a Tuesday and I was gone by Friday, and I’ve spent two years telling myself that she got out the way I did, because the other version is one I can’t carry.” She looked at me. “So I need you to hear this part, because nobody said it to me. He’s not going to hurt you. I don’t think he ever touched her either. He’s just going to keep going until there’s no difference between the three of us, and then one day you’ll turn around in a parking lot to a name that isn’t yours, and you’ll realize it’s been months since anyone used the real one.”
“That already happened,” I said.
“I know,” said Julie. “That’s why I called her. I ask every few months. This time she said he’d found someone.”
I drove home the long way.
He was at the kitchen table when I came in. Six thirty. His mug on the left. He looked up and his face was open and pleased and completely kind.
“Where were you?”
“Nowhere.”
“You took the car.”
“I drove around.”
He watched me take my coat off. He watched me hang it on the hook where her coat had hung, where the coat before hers had hung. He watched me go to the cupboard and take down a mug and put it on the right side of the counter, and something happened at the corner of his mouth, very small, and he did not say anything.
I went upstairs. I took the one bag I had come with. I put in the things that had been mine before October. It didn’t take long. There weren’t many.
I didn’t go into the attic. I want you to know I thought about it, and I didn’t, because Julie had told me what was in the box and I believed her, and because I understood that if I went up there and looked, I would be another woman standing over that box on a Tuesday, and I had decided to be a woman who was already at the door.
He was at the bottom of the stairs when I came down.
He didn’t block the way. He wouldn’t. He stood to one side of it with his hands at his sides and his face doing nothing, and he waited until my hand was on the doorknob.
“Tessa,” he said.
And it took me a full second, one whole second, with my hand on the door and my bag on my shoulder, to understand that he meant me.