“That was fast,” I said.
“I found a woman to love, and who would love me back one hundred percent and then some.”
“You and your money more likely,” I said.
“A woman,” he said.
Do not do it, I thought. Do not. Do it.
“Who is not a freak of nature inside. Who is a whole woman. A whole body, a whole woman.”
“Shut up, Thomas,” I said.
“All this time I was thinking it was me, that I wasn’t man enough, and it was you. You weren’t woman enough, Moonie.”
Oh, I was feeling something now. I was feeling something fierce. This was not my fault. A hot bubble of spit in my mouth. I was cursing into the phone. I cannot even repeat it now, the cruel and vile things that came out of me. I will leave it to the imagination. Imagine hate, imagine hurt, imagine humiliation. Imagine months of being alone in your head thinking awful thoughts and then saying it all at once. I was only getting started though. I had so much more to do.
Valka had moved across the room. I was calling my husband a whore, I remember that. It did not make any sense to call him that, but it was how I felt. I wanted someone to strike him down. An evil whore. Valka stood there quietly watching me, her arms at her sides. It was like she had seen a ghost, or maybe she was just seeing me for the first time. She did not know. Nobody knew. Everything I knew was destroyed. I was a tree after a hurricane, roots up. Could she see my roots? At last could she see?
There was me making quiet noises at the end, and crying, and Thomas telling me not to bother using the credit cards, it was all over, they were shut off. I had better get back to town with that money, and fast. And when I got there, I had better be ready to sign divorce papers.
Like I am signing divorce papers, I thought.
“I don’t have much use for you anymore,” he said. “But I want to get going on this next marriage. There’s legal terms for what’s wrong with you. I got a lawyer from Omaha and he says he can make it stick.”
I could feel my insides crushing, like he had reached in there with his hand and was just squeezing me. My heart was nothing but a bunch of straw to him. I dropped the phone. Valka walked over and turned off the power. She sat and held me as I wept. I was curled as tight as I could be. I was shrinking into myself.
“Tell me,” said Valka. “Do you want to tell me? You don’t have to. But maybe I can help.”
“I need help,” I said.
“I will help you,” she said. “But you have to tell me the truth.”
I looked at her. She was the first person in a long time who did not need a thing from me. She did not need my help, she did not need my sympathy, she did not need my silence. She was pure in her intent.
So I opened my mouth and told her the truth.
Part Two
9.
It started, as most bad ideas did around our home, with a TV show. Thomas and I were watching it on a Sunday afternoon, back home on the couch after our usual breakfast at the diner downstairs: eggs, bacon, white toast buttered on both sides. Our friend from high school, Timber, worked the grill and always waved at me from the rear of the diner. The place was empty. Most of the town was at church. The rest of them would be sleeping off the night before. Sometimes my parents would come and join us, my dad somber and stiff, his handsome face grayed by decades of working indoors, and my mother talking a mile a minute about nothing in particular, secretly mourning the days when she found her life more interesting. I took great comfort in these breakfasts, knowing we would never be like my mother and father. Thomas and I were in love, our marriage was ripe and new, and we did not understand yet that it could be possible to hate each other.