Chapter 3: In Sickness
I knew who Crissy was. Everybody in Harlan Creek knew.
Crystal Boone. Tom’s high school girlfriend, the one in the homecoming photo his mama still keeps on the piano. She married a man named Wade Haynes who owns the feed and hardware store on Main Street and sits on the deacon board at First Baptist. I’d met her once, at Tom’s father’s funeral, eleven years ago. She’d held my hand too long and said, “So you’re the one.”
Kelsey scrolled for me because my hands wouldn’t do it.
It had started in January, while I was still learning to walk around the block again. A friend request. Is this the Tommy Delaney who still owes me a slow dance? Then months of it. Pictures of the beach. Pictures of her.
And then the ones about me.
Does she suspect anything?
Mo? She can barely get off the couch. She’ll pay for the whole thing. She always does.
Wade thinks I’m at my sister’s in Jacksonville. Fifteen whole days, Tommy.
I sat in my daughter’s car and read my husband describe me as furniture.
“We’re going in there,” Kelsey said. “Right now.”
“Kels…”
“Right now, Mom.”
Tom was in his recliner with the Braves on. He looked up when we came in together, and something in his face shifted, just for a second, before the showroom smile came back.
Kelsey set the old phone on the arm of his chair with the vault open.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he picked up the remote and turned the TV off, slowly, like a man who’d been interrupted.
“You went through my private phone.”
“You asked me to,” Kelsey said.
“To move my pictures.”
“Is it true?” I said.
He looked at me then. Not ashamed. Tired. Annoyed, even. Like I was a light someone had left on.
“You really want to do this, Mo? Fine.” He stood up. “Look at yourself. When’s the last time you let me touch you? Two years? I stood by you through all of it. I was a good husband. But a man has needs, and you don’t have anything left to give. What did you expect me to do, become a monk?”
“Dad.” Kelsey’s voice cracked. “She had cancer.”
“And I didn’t leave, did I? I’m still here.” He spread his hands like a man being reasonable. “Fifteen days. That’s all I’m asking. I come back, nobody gets hurt, we go on like before.”
I waited for the part of me that used to fight to stand up.
It didn’t.
What stood up instead was the twenty-five-year-old in the Kroger parking lot. The woman in the infusion chair. The fifty-two-year-old who’d need someone to drive her home from her scan on the twentieth.
“Go to Georgia, Tom,” I heard myself say. “Just come back.”
Kelsey stared at me like I’d slapped her.
Out in the driveway she cried, which she almost never does. “You can’t let him do this to you. You can’t.”
“I’m not doing it again, honey. I’m not starting over at fifty-two with a port scar and a pill box. I’m not sitting alone in that waiting room.”
“You won’t be alone. You have me.”
“You have your own life.” I took her face in my hands. “Promise me you’ll leave it alone. Please. It’s my marriage.”
She didn’t promise. She got in her car and sat there with the engine running for a long time before she pulled away.
I went to bed in our room. Tom slept in the recliner.
At 11:52 my phone lit up on the nightstand. A text from the bank.
Transfer complete: $9,000.00 from DELANEY SAVINGS to account ending 4471.
Delaney Savings was my mother’s money. The money we’d set aside for my treatment, for my deductibles, for whatever came next.
I had never heard of account 4471.
