“I’ve heard that. Like serial cheaters who really, truly love the person that they’re with, but just… I don’t know if they get bored exactly, or if they just can’t stay true to one person.”
“Yeah, part of me wonders if she could help it, and then another part of me thinks about the times that I intend to do wrong, want to do wrong, and I don’t. I’d like to be able to say I can’t help it, but I do? So couldn’t she?”
“That’s a good point. Why do some people seem to be incapable of resisting temptation, and seem to thrive on doing whatever they want, and then just issue an apology like that will make it all go away. It doesn’t really seem fair or right.”
“Exactly.”
He looked at the ground, the grass green underneath, but brown on top. Typical for November. Maybe if he had been there, they could have gotten another cutting off that and made some hay.
That seemed like an odd thing to think about after he had just told this woman, this woman who seemed to fit him perfectly, about his wife.
“So that was a real struggle then. As she was dying, it would have been hard to see your children so sad. I guess it would have beentempting for me to let them know that they weren’t losing as much as they thought they were. And let them know about her character.”
“I suppose sometimes I wanted to, but mostly I don’t want them to know. I don’t want them to think less of her. But at the same time…it’s the truth. And I wondered too if it would help them get over her better if I told them that maybe we weren’t going to stay together, or if that would rock the foundations of everything that they believed.”
“I think that’s probably right. And sometimes we have a tendency to attack the messenger. They might turn around and hate you for telling them the truth about their mom. That doesn’t make any sense, but sometimes humans don’t make any sense.”
“Tell me about it,” he muttered, and she laughed. He had been being serious, but he supposed it was funny, too.
“Humans really don’t make sense sometimes. And I suppose you can’t say this, but I can: especially women.”
“Amen,” he said, and then he laughed too. He liked that she wasn’t afraid to poke fun at her gender. And she could say the things that were true or obvious, but things people often didn’t want to say because they were too scared.
“I think maybe women have a tendency to run on emotion more than men do. And that’s what makes us so illogical. Because we allow our emotions to control us. I’ve noticed my tendency toward doing that, and I try to curtail that, because while I feel emotion is important, obviously God gave it to us, and it serves an important purpose in our life, it’s not what we should allow to direct our day-to-day life. We should do things because they’re right, because we’re supposed to do them, because we have character and we do the right thing, we choose that, not because we feel like it or don’t feel like it.”
“It’s too bad more people don’t feel that way, because you’re absolutely right. People run on emotion, and they don’t feel like doing it, so they don’t. That doesn’t get you anywhere.”
“It’s not right. I mean, I don’t necessarily think that we should shove our emotions aside and pretend that we don’t have any, but atthe same time, we can’t allow them to dictate how we live our lives. Otherwise no one would stay true, because there’s always going to be a time when you’re attracted to someone you shouldn’t be attracted to, and how are you going to handle that? Go with your emotions? That’s wrong.”
“Maybe that was Desire’s problem. She had never learned to put what she felt aside and do the right thing.”
“Well, she did stay with you. There was that at least.”
“She tried to run off with her boyfriend, but he was married too, and he didn’t want to leave his wife. He just wanted someone to play with on the side.” He looked at his shoulder. “At least that was one of her lovers. There were apparently other ones, and I’m not sure why she didn’t run off with any of them. I suppose I could try to dig it all up, but I don’t want to, you know?”
“Yeah. I totally get that. Sometimes things are better left in the past. Because they would just upset us and make us angry. And there’s really nothing to be done about it now anyway.”
“Other than to find out whether or not my children are actually mine,” he muttered, then he met her eyes, which widened at his statement. Obviously she hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“Oh my goodness.” Then she shook her head and flattened her lips. “It wouldn’t make any difference at all. You would still love your children as yours, if you found out they weren’t. Worse, if somehow that word got out, someone else might try to take them from you, and that would devastate you. So you don’t even want to go there.” She sounded so sure, so convinced that he was going to do the right thing, that he was shocked for a moment.
“It took me weeks to come to that conclusion.”
“But I knew you would right away, because that’s the kind of person you are.”
“Maybe that’s where your intuition works with logic. You come to the right conclusion, where I was just using logic, and it took me a while to think on it.”
“Possibly,” she said, sounding almost cheerful. Maybe she washappy that she was right. She knew she was living with someone who was a little bit decent.
She didn’t seem to look down on him because he couldn’t keep his wife true. Even though he knew it wasn’t his fault. Even though she had just said that it wasn’t his fault, sometimes he still felt like it was. Like he should have done something or been more or somehow been able to keep her attention.
He knew there were people who would say that he wasn’t a good husband, and that’s why his wife had cheated.
He leaned on the board, allowing it to wobble and maybe lean a little bit as he thought. “I’m sorry I dumped on you.”
“No. Honestly, I was curious. But I didn’t want to ask. It just seemed too much like prying.”
“I thought I told you that you could ask anything you wanted to, and I would be okay with it?”
