We sat there on the floor for a long time without saying anything. The baseball game flickered on the silent TV. Downstairs, I could hear the dry cleaner’s big machines humming through the floor.
“You remember our wedding?” I finally asked.
He laughed through his tears. “It rained. The roof leaked on your Aunt Doris.”
“Do you remember what you said? When Pastor Jim got to the part about sickness and health?”
He didn’t answer.
“You squeezed my hands so hard they hurt,” I said. “And you looked right at me, and you said it louder than any of the other parts. In sickness and in health. Everybody in the church heard you. My mother leaned over to Lynn afterward and said, ‘That boy means it.’”
“I did mean it,” he said. “I meant it for you. If you got sick, I’d take care of you forever. I’d never leave.”
“So it only goes one way?”
He looked at me.
“You get to keep the promise,” I said, “but I don’t? You get to be the strong one, the one who takes care of everybody, the one who drives forty minutes each way every night with dinner and a clean shirt? But the second it’s your turn to be the one who needs help, I’m not allowed?”
“That’s not…”
“That’s exactly what it is, Greg. You decided I wasn’t strong enough. You decided for me. You took my promise away from me without even asking.”
He covered his face with his hands. His shoulders were shaking.
I reached into my purse and pulled out the manila envelope.
He saw it and went very still.
“You never signed them,” he said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not a quitter,” I said. “And neither are you. You’re just scared.”
I took the papers out of the envelope. Every page with his neat, careful signature on it. Every page with that blank line underneath, waiting for my name.
And I tore them in half.
Then I tore them in half again. And again. And again. Until there was nothing left but a pile of little white scraps on the floor between us, like snow.
Greg stared at the pile.
Then he made a sound I had never heard him make in twenty-two years. A low, broken sound, all the way from the bottom of him, like something giving way inside.
I put my arms around him. He put his face against my shoulder, and he cried like a little boy. He cried like he’d been holding it in since that day in the clinic parking lot. Since the day at the diner. Maybe since he was two years old and his father walked out the door and never came back.
I held on to him, and I didn’t let go.
“I’m so scared, Claire,” he whispered. “I’m so scared.”
“I know. I’m scared too.”
“I don’t want you to see me like that.”
“I’ve seen you throw up on a roller coaster at Six Flags,” I said. “I’ve seen you get stuck in our chimney trying to fix the flue on Christmas Eve. I’ve seen you cry at a dog food commercial. I can handle it.”
He laughed. A wet, shaky laugh against my shoulder.
“The dog food commercial was very sad,” he said.
“It was a dog food commercial, Greg.”
“The old dog was waiting by the door for the little boy to come home from college.”
“I know. I was there.”
We laughed. Then we cried. Then we laughed some more. We sat there on the floor of that sad little apartment until almost three in the morning, in a pile of torn-up divorce papers.
Somewhere around one-thirty, I texted Lynn and told her to go home.
She texted back one word. “FINALLY.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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