It just wasn't the right game.
"It wasn't nothing, Jolene." I say it carefully, because I owe her that much. "What we had. What you gave. It wasn't nothing."
"Then why wasn't it enough?"
I look at her. This woman I've known for over thirty years. The mother of my children.
The blonde hair and blue eyes that used to be pretty and are now sharp, honed by decades of holding on to something that was never really hers.
"Because it wasn't," I say. "And we both know it. We've both known it for a long time."
She stares at me and I watch the hope die.
Not all at once—it's been dying for years, maybe decades—but this is the last of it.
The final flicker going dark behind her eyes.
I've seen men take bullets with more composure than what crosses her face right now.
"You're throwing me away." It's not a question.
"I'm telling you the truth. I should have told you a long time ago."
"Thetruth." She spits the word. "You want to talk about truth, Harlan? The truth is that I built something with you. A life. A family. A legacy. And you're sitting there throwing it in the dirt because you never loved me the way I?—"
She catches herself. Jaw tight. Hands fisted at her sides. The nails she maintains so carefully digging into her own palms.
"The way you loved me," I finish for her. "No. I didn't. And that's not your fault. But it's the truth, and I'm done pretending it isn't."
Something shifts behind her eyes. The grief is still there but it's hardening. Calcifying in real time, right in front of me, the way grief does when it has nowhere to go and turns into something feral.
"You'll regret this."
"Maybe."
"Your daughters?—"
"My daughters are grown women. They'll understand."
"They'll understand that their father tossed their mother aside after thirty years?"
"They'll understand that their father finally had the decency to stop wasting their mother's time."
That lands. I see it hit.
She flinches—a real flinch, not performative, the kind that comes from hearing something true that you'd rather die than acknowledge.
She picks up her purse.
The purse that's probably worth more than most of the trucks in the parking lot.
Her hands are shaking but her spine is straight because Jolene does not bend in public, even when public is just me and the cattle and a hundred thousand acres of indifferent Texas.
"Thirty years," she says from the top of the steps. Not looking at me. "Thirty years, Harlan. And this is how it ends. On a porch."
We ended thirteen years ago. Signed the papers, split the assets, took the rings off. It should have been over then. But she came back around—kept showing up, kept sitting in that chair, kept acting like the divorce was a technicality and not a verdict. And I let her. Because it was easier than this.
I don't respond. There's nothing to say that won't make it worse.
