“Larry, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t make that face.”
“What face?”
“The face people make when they’re already standing at your funeral.”
Even then, he managed to make me laugh.
But I kept staring at the sign.
“Why marriage?”
Larry looked at his coffee.
“I don’t want to die belonging to nobody.”
“You don’t belong to nobody.”
“That’s a nice thing to say, Sarah.”
He looked toward the street.
“But it’s different when there’s paperwork.”
He explained that without legal family, strangers would eventually deal with his remains.
He didn’t want that.
“I just want one person who can say, ‘He’s mine. I’ll take care of him.’”
I was single.
Larry was dying.
And I had always been better at solving problems than walking away from them.
Two days later, we went to the courthouse.
Larry wore a clean blue shirt somebody at the shelter had given him.
I wore my navy work dress.
When the clerk asked whether we had rings, Larry checked his empty pockets dramatically.
“Knew I forgot something.”
I laughed.
Eleven minutes later, I became his wife.
Exactly three weeks after that, I sat beside his bed in a state hospice facility and held his hand while his breathing slowly stopped.
And now his letter was telling me that the reason I had married him wasn’t entirely true.
I forced myself to keep reading.
“The liver failure was real. The month was real. What I lied about was why I asked you to marry me.”
I lowered the letter.
Then immediately picked it up again.
“My arrangements were already taken care of. Hospice or the county would have handled the paperwork. I wasn’t going to disappear without a name.”
I stood so quickly my chair scraped across the floor.
“What did you do, Larry?”
There was nowhere for my anger to go.
He was dead.
I couldn’t call him.
I couldn’t demand an explanation.
I couldn’t even force him to sit across from me and watch the expression on my face.
I kept reading.
“If I gave you a problem you could solve, I knew you would solve it.”
That sentence hurt the most.
Because it was true.
For two years, I had constantly offered Larry things.
Coffee.
Food.
Warm socks.
Shelter phone numbers.
Once, during a brutal cold spell, I spent half my lunch break calling shelters until I found an available bed.
