Part 7
Part 7 · 2 min read ·
I was beginning to understand that a person could do the right thing without getting an immediate reward for it.
Then Ruth called.
“Hey,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d have dinner with me. Just the two of us. Nobody else at the table. Nobody making toasts.”
“A dinner isn’t me coming home, Ruth.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not moving back.”
“I know that, too.”
I thought about it.
“Saturday.”
When I arrived, she was already there.
“You beat me here.”
“Ten minutes early,” she said. “I learned that from you.”
We ordered dinner.
Ruth told me the yard was steady. Expansion was still on hold, but the company was making money without it.
Her mother was getting the monthly support she needed, with Ruth, Wayne, and Joe sharing the cost.
Delores had even bought herself a little ledger to record every dollar.
“She hates that we can all see the numbers now,” Ruth said.
“Good for her.”
Ruth put down her fork.
“I wrote some things down.”
I looked at her.
“You always did like things on paper,” she said.
She unfolded a sheet.
“One. I let my family make your service into a joke.”
She looked up at me, then continued.
“Two. I took the thanks for money that was yours.”
She swallowed.
“Three. I treated your money like it would always be there.”
Then the fourth.
“I let you swallow things so I wouldn’t have to fight my own family.”
She set the paper down.
“On our fifteenth anniversary, I called it a joke. It was cruel.”
I listened.
“I always told myself you stayed because you needed me,” she said. “But you never needed me. Not for one day.”
Her voice broke slightly.
“You stayed because you chose me. Every day for fifteen years.”
She looked straight at me.
“I didn’t know what that was worth until you stopped.”
I didn’t speak immediately.
Ruth waited.
Then she said, “I’m not here to bring you home tonight.”
“Good.”
“Or to ask you to forgive me tonight.”
“Then what are you asking?”
“A chance to be somebody you’d pick again.”
For a long time, I looked at her.
I wanted to believe her.
I also knew what it had cost me to stop doing everything for her.
Finally, I said, “Counseling. Every week. You set it up, and you show up.”
“Okay.”
“My money stays separate.”
“Okay.”
“The loan gets paid back the way it’s written.”
“It will.”
I watched her face.
“You married me, Ruth. Not your whole family. If they disrespect me again, I won’t be the one smoothing it over.”
“They won’t.”
“Don’t promise me how they’ll act. Tell me what you’ll do.”
She answered without looking away.
“I’ll speak up.”
That was where we started.
Not back at the beginning.
Not as though the anniversary dinner had never happened.
We started with an agreement that the marriage couldn’t continue as it had.
Counseling became part of our lives.