At my wife’s funeral, a man I had never seen sat in the front row and cried harder than I did. He was about fifty. Gray at the temples. He had Ruth’s eyes. Exactly her eyes. When the pastor finished, he walked to the casket, touched her hand and whispered one word. “Mom.” I have two children. Both were standing next to me. Neither of them looked surprised. My daughter took my arm and said quietly, “Dad, we all knew. Everyone knew but you.” Forty-six years of marriage. Every Thursday for thirty years Ruth went to “book club” . I never once asked to see a book. After the service the man came to me holding an envelope with my name on it. In Ruth’s handwriting. The first line said.
“Thaddeus, if you are reading this, then I was a coward until the very end, and I am sorry.”
I could not read any more standing up. I sat down on a folding chair at the back of the fellowship hall, and the stranger sat down next to me, not too close. He didn’t say anything. He seemed to understand that I needed the silence.
The letter was four pages long. Ruth always wrote too much in letters. She said in person what she had to and saved the rest for paper.
When she was seventeen, two years before I met her at the county fair, she had a baby boy. Her parents sent her to an aunt in Ohio for the last months, and the baby was given to a family in Dayton. She was told to forget him and never speak of it. She did as she was told for nineteen years. Then, when our son was born, something broke open in her. She hired a man to find her first boy. His name was Daniel. He was twenty-one, working at a hardware store, and he had been looking for her too.
They met for the first time at a diner halfway between us. After that, every Thursday.
“I meant to tell you that first year,” she wrote. “Then the second. Then it had been so long that the lie was bigger than the truth, and I was afraid that if I told you, you would look at me the way my father did. I couldn’t bear it. I told the children when they were grown because Daniel wanted to meet his brother and sister. I made them promise. Please don’t be angry with them. Be angry with me. I can take it now.”
I folded the letter and looked at the man beside me.
“Daniel,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Thirty years of Thursdays.”
“Yes, sir. Thirty years. She never missed one unless one of your kids was sick.” He swallowed hard. “She talked about you every week. How you fixed the neighbor’s furnace for free. How you cried at your daughter’s wedding and pretended it was allergies. I feel like I know you, Mr. Crane. I know that’s strange.”
It was strange. It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to me. And I am ashamed to say my first feeling was not kindness. It was anger. Not at Daniel — at my children. They were standing across the room by the coffee urn, watching me, and I felt like the only person at my own wife’s funeral who hadn’t been invited to the real party.
I went home alone that night. I didn’t answer the phone. I sat in Ruth’s chair and looked at the shelf where she kept her book club books, every one of them unread, the spines still stiff.
My son came the next morning. Michael is forty-four and he still knocks on my door like he’s twelve and in trouble.
“Dad,” he said, “Mom made us swear. She said it would kill you. She said you’d never forgive her, and she couldn’t die with you not forgiving her.”
“So you all decided I was too weak for the truth.”
“No,” he said. “We decided she was too scared to tell it. We were wrong. I’m sorry.”
We sat at the kitchen table for a long time. Then my daughter Carol came, and she cried, and she said what she’d said at the funeral was the worst thing she’d ever said to anybody and she’d been sick about it all night. I believed her. I had raised her. I know when she means it.
