The first Tuesday my husband ironed his own shirt, I should have known something was wrong. Royce has not touched an iron in forty years of marriage unless I put it in his hand myself and stood over him like a prison guard, and there he was in our bedroom in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, pressing a crease into a snap shirt he hadn’t worn since his mother’s funeral, humming something under his breath that was almost a tune. He smelled like the good cologne, the one I bought him three Christmases ago that still had two thirds of the bottle left because Royce Tanner does not believe in wasting cologne on a Tuesday.
“Legion business,” he said, when I asked where he was headed at six thirty on a weeknight with his hair combed wet and his good boots on, the ones with the little heel taps that click on the linoleum like a man walking into a courtroom. “Cleatis needs help with something.”
Cleatis Wray has run the Sapulpa American Legion post for eleven years and has never once, to my knowledge, needed help from Royce that required cologne. I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched my husband of thirty-nine years and eleven months back his truck down our gravel drive at a speed I would call, if I were being honest in a court of law, eager, and something in my stomach did a slow, ugly roll that I recognized from exactly one other period of my life, which was 1987, when a certain parts-counter girl at the John Deere dealership caused my husband to develop a sudden, passionate interest in replacing a perfectly good tractor battery every six weeks.
Nothing came of 1987. I want to say that up front, because I am not a woman who runs around accusing her husband of things without cause, and by the time you finish this story you are going to understand exactly how much cause I believed I had, and exactly how wrong I turned out to be, and exactly how glad I am that I was wrong in the particular way I was wrong instead of any of the ways I lay awake imagining.
Royce and I have been married forty years this August. We met at the Creek County Fair when I was twenty-two and selling raffle tickets for the volunteer fire department, and he bought eleven dollars’ worth of tickets in ones just so he’d have a reason to keep coming back to my folding table, which I did not figure out until our fifteenth anniversary when he finally admitted he’d thrown every single one of those tickets in the trash without checking a number. We got engaged nine months later and planned a real wedding, a Baptist church wedding with a band and a dance floor rented from a party supply place in Tulsa, and two weeks before the date the transmission went out on my daddy’s grain truck right before wheat harvest, and the nine hundred dollars it cost to fix it was every dollar anybody in either family had set aside for a reception. So we got married on a Tuesday morning in the Creek County courthouse in fourteen minutes flat, with my sister and Royce’s cousin standing up as witnesses, and we celebrated afterward with cheeseburgers at the Sonic on Dewey Avenue because that was what was in both our pockets. There was no band. There was no dance floor. There was no first dance, the one everybody plans and practices and cries through, and for forty years it has been the one small splinter in an otherwise good marriage, the thing I brought up exactly twice, both times a little bit joking and both times with something underneath the joke that Royce, being Royce, heard clearly and never once knew what to do with.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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