My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 13

My Husband’s Other Wife Was My Maid of Honor Chapter 13 – The Plum Tree

moved into my grandmother’s house in June, fourteen months after the ballroom.

The tenants had let it go. The porch sagged, the gutters were full, there was a wasp nest in the eave. The plum tree hadn’t been pruned in six years and had gone wild and heavy and slightly insane, dropping fruit all over the yard for nobody.

I fixed it myself. Not because I’m inspirational. Because I had a settlement check and a lot of rage and nothing to do with my hands on the weekends.

I learned to use a nail gun off YouTube. I re-hung the porch swing. I painted the kitchen a yellow my grandmother would have called loud. I ripped out the dead hedges he’d planted the year we rented it out and

put in raspberries.

I sold the marital house. Every stick of furniture went with it, including the couch he fought me for. I kept exactly four things from eleven years with Grant Whitaker: my books, my mother’s mixing bowls, my dog Bage

and the quilt.

The quilt came back to me in a box from Mara, washed and folded, with a note that said This was never ours.

I don’t use it. It’s in the cedar chest. But I have it.

The letters started in the fall. Prison mail, three of them, all in that handwriting I’d know anywhere.

I opened the first one in the driveway.

It was four pages. He’d been in therapy. He’d been reading. He understood now that he had “an attachment disorder rooted in his father leaving.” He wrote that I was the only person who ever really saw him. He wrote that Mara had preyed on his loneliness. He wrote that when he got out he wasn’t asking for anything, just one conversation, because he couldn’t bear the idea of me remembering him as a monster.

Nine paragraphs about himself.

One sentence about the house he stole.

Zero sentences about his children.

I read it standing up, and then I walked around the side of the house to the burn barrel, and I lit it and watched it go, and I felt absolutely nothing. That’s the part they don’t put in the movies. Not triumph. Not closure. Just a small, boring quiet, like turning off a fan you didn’t know was running.

The other two I never opened.

He got out in the spring. He lives with Diane. He works at a title company in a town two hours south, which

somebody found very funny online. He owes me restitution payments of $1,180 a month until 2039, and every time one lands in my account I put it directly into two savings accounts.

hey’re in Poppy and Theodore’s names.

it’s

Mara doesn’t know. She’d refuse it and I’d have to argue with her and I don’t want to. It’s not forgiveness just that I decided a long time ago that the only two people in this story who never did anything wrong are not going to pay for it. He stole my grandmother’s house from me. My grandmother would have wanted the money/

to land on a kid.

That’s it. That’s the whole reason.

And on the second Saturday of September, my sister Liv came out with her kids, and Noah came with wine

and we picked eleven pounds of plums off a tree that had spent six years fruiting for nobody, and I made nine jars of jam in a loud yellow kitchen in a house with my name on the deed.

My own name. In my own handwriting.

Then the doorbell rang.