I buried her yesterday. I stood at her grave and cried for her. And she was cheating on me.
I’m on my fourth drink, maybe my fifth, when Nora walks in.
“Sawyer?” She looks surprised to see me, concern immediately crossing her face. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d be at home.”
“Couldn’t be at home right now.”Couldn’t be anywhere that reminds me of her.
She slides onto the stool next to me, and I can feel her studying me. “Everything okay? I mean, besides… you know.”
Besides my wife dying? Besides having to bury her yesterday? Everything is just peachy.
“Found out today that my dead wife was having an affair for eight months. And apparently she was planning on leaving me.”
Nora goes completely still. “Oh, Sawyer.”
“Her boyfriend felt guilty and decided to come by the station and confess. Real nice of him, right? Wait until after the funeral to tell me my marriage was basically a lie.” I take another drink, welcoming the burn. “Tom Bradley. History teacher. Nice guy, apparently. Nice enough to fuck my wife behind my back for almost a year.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“She was going to leave me. Did you know that? She was planning to ask for a divorce, and I had no fucking idea.” How did I not see it? How was I so blind?
Nora signals the bartender for a drink of her own. When it comes, she just sits with it, quiet. Waiting.
“You want to talk about it?” she asks finally.
“What’s to talk about? She’s dead, and I’m angry at her, and I feel guilty for being angry at someone who’s dead. It’s fucked up.”
“It’s not fucked up. It just means you’re human.”
Is it? Because I feel like a monster for being furious at someone I just buried.
For the next two hours, Nora sits with me while I work through my anger and pain and guilt. She doesn’t try to fix anything. She just listens when I want to talk and sits quietly when I don’t.
“I don’t know how to grieve someone who betrayed me,” I say finally, staring into my empty glass.
“Maybe you grieve the person you thought she was. And you’re angry at the person she actually was. Those can be true at the same time.”
Can they? Can I love someone and hate them at the same time?
“I loved her, Nora. But I don’t know if she ever really loved me back.”
“She married you. She spent five years with you. That has to mean something.”
“Does it? Or was she just going through the motions like Tom said?” I signal for another drink. “Was I just convenient? Safe? Boring Sawyer Edwards with his steady job and his predictable life? You know I wasn’t going to be a patrol officer forever. I just never knew what I wanted to do or where to move up.”
“You’re not boring.”
“Apparently boring enough that she needed someone else.”Someone more exciting. Someone better.
By the time the bar closes, I’m too drunk to drive and too emotionally wrecked to care.Let me sleep in the parking lot. Let me disappear.
“Come on,” Nora says, helping me off the stool. “I’ll take you home.”
“I don’t want to go home. Everything there reminds me of her.” Her coffee mug in the sink. Her shoes by the door. Her side of the bed still unmade from the last time she slept there before she died.
“Then I’ll take you to your mom’s.”
My mom’s. Like I’m a kid again who can’t handle his own life.
