A Clean Break

How Much She Meant to Me

I should have remembered what I learned in that leadership seminar I attended a few years ago. If I had, I would have told Connie that maybe a Thursday would be better than a Friday to tell her husband, Darryl, she was leaving him for me. One of the topics at that seminar was how to deliver bad news. “Timing is everything,” the lady speaker said. She wrote Friday on the board and put a red circle around it. “For instance, never fire an employee on a Friday.” She drew a line through the circle. “It gives them a whole weekend to stew and nothing to do about it.” She cocked her finger and thumb. Pointed that finger-gun at the audience. “You never truly know what a person is capable of.”

It was the Memorial holiday weekend, and Darryl had planned some renovation work on the house he and Connie lived in. I hoped Darryl would continue with these plans. Keeping busy, especially with manual labor, is a good way to take a man’s mind off painful news. It can’t be easy to learn that your wife is in love with another man.

Connie was going to the ocean with me for the long weekend. That’s why we agreed she’d tell Darryl before we left. He could settle with the news, come to terms with it. When we came back to Springs after the weekend he would be ready for the next step, which was him moving out of the house. And the step after that, which was me moving in.

We left town thinking it was nice to have things out in the open, to not be meeting up on one of the back roads, or at a motel in Washton, and with no worry about being seen by someone we knew, someone from Springs. In a small town like Springs, the discovery of a secret is like striking gold. People can’t wait to show off their big nugget. I didn’t like all that sneaking around. It was duplicitous. That’s the word for it. Duplicitous. But that’s how much Connie meant to me, that I would be duplicitous for her.

I picked Connie up after she delivered the bad news to Darryl. I was prepared for her to be upset, but not to the extent that she was. Her neck was a band of tension, which I tried to massage with one hand while I drove. She had me stop five times along the way to the ocean so she could smoke. I don’t like smoke in my car. It would have been better for her to relax and listen to the music mix I’d made for her. It was all of our special songs.

Each time we stopped she said something about Darryl. “I feel disturbed,” she said. “Disturbed and sad. I’m just beside myself. He had no idea.” She shook her head back and forth. “No idea. He was just bereft. Bereft and distraught.” That’s one of the things Connie and I shared, our passion for just the right words to describe a situation.

Connie and I walked on the beach after we got there. I kept trying to hold her hand but she picked up a piece of wood and trailed it in the sand, leaving a line between our footprints. I took it from her and used it to write this in the sand: VB + CP. I drew a heart around it. I know it was corny, but that’s how much she meant to me.

Connie looked at the heart for a long time. Then she looked up at me and, even though she didn’t have tears in her eyes, I think she was close to crying. She had been with Darryl Parker all those years, and I’m sure he never did a romantic thing like that for her.

At dinner that night, Connie was quiet and didn’t have much of an appetite, but I was ravenous. I had a cheeseburger with...