Free Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood Page B

looking at Molly. It was not like Alice to leave off the I’m .
    It wasn’t very long after that that Mike began to go downhill fast. He had to go for outpatient transfusions. Molly was one of those Alice invited to drive him and sit with him while the blood dripped in.
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    AFTER THE FUNERAL there was a long period when Molly contrived to have his name come up. Her friend Rita, who was a reporter at the paper, said, “O’Meara. Jeez, the poor guy. Something about him. He had that way. He never acted on it. Whoa, don’t get me wrong. But he was always kinda playing. Those eyes. I know a couple of women who—”
    â€œOh, don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me that, Rita.”
    â€œDon’t speak ill of the dead?”
    â€œI don’t mean that. I just don’t want to know who. Who?”
    â€œI think Marian. Yeah. She taught their kids. And Cathy Daley at the paper. They were always flirting around. She actually tried to get him to meet her someplace. He didn’t, of course. He never would have.”
    Molly had never seen Mike flirt with anyone. Never. Was
there a world for each pair of eyes? Like a private screening for each person, and yours was tailored to you?
    She tried to ask Alice about this, delicately. Maybe the woman was just a fling. Obviously his heart was still with his family. Was he a man who had flings? “No,” Alice told her. “No. That, he would never do. This was serious. He was in love. He thought we could separate, for God’s sake. He was trying to figure it all out. Whether I could take it. That’s probably the worst thing he said. ‘You can bear it, can’t you, you’re so strong.’ He was in love. He could barely walk at that point, his counts were so low, and he was talking about getting an apartment. ”
    â€œOh, Alice.”
    â€œTo be with her.”
    â€œOh, God.”
    â€œI know. I know. But he didn’t get to, did he?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHe never got to. And I have to think it was because of her, because she wouldn’t. And I never knew who it was. It was a freak thing. Oh, he had his deal, with women. That was just his way. But you know him, Molly. You know how he was, about his family. But one day . . . he said he just looked up one day and there she was.”
    â€œOh, God.”
    â€œIt was love. He couldn’t think about anything else. She was younger than we are, of course. But she broke up with him at one point. When she told him she wouldn’t see him any more he said that was like what he sometimes felt in the morgue. He would tell me these things. If he saw something unbearable in the morgue, his legs started to hurt. So I knew I had to let him. Oh, first I said, ‘Maybe your legs hurt because of the lymphoma.’”
    â€œOh, Alice. His legs hurt. You thought it was me.”

    â€œOnly that one day. Unbelievable. Sorry. I used to ask myself whether it was this person or that person, how young she was—I never could ask him her exact age—was she some friend of the girls’—but she was too sad-sounding to be all that young, she wasn’t so ruthless, was she, or wouldn’t she have gone off with him? Or whether she was somebody I saw in the grocery store, or at church . . . he liked Catholic women, you know, they were the kind he really liked because of filling the time at Mass when he was a kid, lusting over all those kneeling legs. But of course he didn’t go to Mass now so how would he have met them? Molly—” She gave Molly a wolfish glare. “You would tell me if you knew, wouldn’t you?”
    Jeff said the same thing to her. “You must have known who it was. Women always know.” He was angry at Mike; he wanted to have been told. He was Mike’s best friend. “Think she came to the funeral?” But at the funeral, only Alice was watching. None of this was spoken of before he died.
    Alice