Richard and I were married in June of 1982 in a church that no longer exists, in a neighborhood that no longer looks like itself, in front of seventy-three people who were witness to a beginning they could not have known would end the way it did.
I was twenty-eight years old.
He was thirty.
We were the kind of young that makes you believe the future is something you can simply decide to have.
I wore a dress my mother made from a pattern she had kept since her own wedding.
He wore a suit that was slightly too large and that he had borrowed from his brother, and the sleeves were wrong but his face was exactly right, the face of a man who was happy, who meant it, who looked at me like I was the specific answer to something he had been looking for.
I believed him.
For a long time, I was correct to believe him.
We had three children.
Patricia, who is forty-one now and who lives in Milwaukee and who has two boys she is raising with the specific exhausted energy of a woman who has too much to do and who does it anyway.
David, who is thirty-eight and who is in Denver, who called every Sunday for the first year after the divorce and then every other Sunday and then monthly and who I do not blame because he has a life and lives it.
And Karen, our youngest, who is thirty-four, and who took it the hardest.
Karen looked at Richard the way I had looked at him in that borrowed-suit photograph.
She had not yet learned that the way a person looks at you is not always the same as who they are.
She has learned it now.
We lived in a house on Maple Street in Chicago for thirty-one years.
Not a large house.
But ours.
I knew every creak in the floor and every draft in winter and which faucet dripped if you did not turn it exactly right.
I knew where the light fell in the kitchen in the late afternoon and what the backyard smelled like after rain and how the heat came up through the registers in a particular order that I had learned because I was the one who was home most and who paid attention to such things.
I was a dental hygienist for nineteen years.
Then I became the kind of person who is not that anymore.
Richard had a business.
A distribution company.
He built it slowly, the way people build things when they are both talented and patient, and by the time the children were grown and gone it was something substantial.
I had worked alongside the building of it in the ways that do not appear on any company document.
The calls taken when he was unavailable.
The dinners prepared for clients.
The years of managing the household while he traveled, managing the children while he was gone, managing the specific invisible work of a life that makes another person’s visible work possible.
I knew what I had contributed.
I knew it in the same way I knew the creaks in the floor.
Intimately and without documentation.
Richard left when I was sixty.
He did not leave for someone else.
Or if he did, he did not say so and I did not investigate because by then the caring required for investigation had already left.
He left because he had decided, at sixty-two, that the life he had was not the life he wanted, and that the life he wanted was the kind that did not include a history.
He said: I need something different.
He said: I’m sorry. I’m just not willing to live like this anymore.
He said it with the gentleness of someone who has rehearsed.
I said: like what?
He said: like we’re waiting for something.
I said: I’m not waiting for anything.
He said: I know.
He said: I know that. That’s the problem.
I understood what he meant.
I was not waiting.
I had never been waiting.
I was living in the present tense of a life I had built and maintained and that I found worth living.
He had been waiting for something else.
He had been waiting for most of our marriage.
I had not known.
The divorce took eleven months.
The settlement was what it was, which is to say that after thirty-seven years and three children and the specific invisible accounting of all that I had contributed, I left with a fraction of what we had built.
The house was sold.
The proceeds were divided.
There were attorneys who spoke about fair and equitable and what the law required.
I had my own attorney.
I also had the understanding that fighting costs money and time and health, and that some battles leave you with the prize but without the person who could enjoy it.
I took what was offered.
At the courthouse, when the official paperwork was signed and it was simply done, Richard pressed a card into my hand.
He said: take it. That should be enough to keep you going for a little while.
He said it with the specific measured tone of a man who had practiced being kind.
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