PART 3
The days after the funeral barely felt real.
The house was suddenly enormous.
Every room was too quiet in a way I had not known was possible in a house I have lived in since 1971.
Every small habit reminded me. Her cup, which I have not moved. Her chair. The particular way the back door needs lifting, which she did automatically and which I still do wrong.
Then one afternoon somebody knocked on the front door.
I had been sitting in the kitchen for about four hours doing nothing at all.
Not reading. Not with the radio on. Sitting at a table in a chair that is not my chair, which is the one I had been sitting in for four days without working out why.
A man I had never seen before was standing there.
About fifty. In a suit that was slightly too warm for the day, with a document case under his arm, on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of October.
He had clearly been standing there for a few seconds before he knocked.
My first thought was that somebody had sent somebody about the insurance.
He introduced himself as Maribeth's attorney.
That confused me straight away.
As far as I knew, Maribeth did not have a lawyer. We had used one twice in sixty years, both times about the house, and he died in 2011 and we went to his funeral.
My wife did not have her own anything. That is what I would have told you on that doorstep with complete confidence.
Then he took out an envelope.
He said: sir, I'm sorry, but she left very specific instructions that I was to give you this only after she passed.
Very specific instructions. That phrase went through me before anything else did.
My wife had given somebody instructions about me. In writing. To be followed after her death.
I stared at him.
My hands had already started going before he said anything else, which they do now and which I have stopped apologising for.
I said: what is this about? Why would my wife hire you?
He hesitated.
He actually looked down at his shoes for about a second, which I noticed at the time and did not understand at all.
I understand it now. He had been told what to say and he had practised it in a car, and the practising had not helped.
And then he said the thing I still wish I had never heard.
He said: your wife?
And he looked straight at me, and I watched him understand, about half a second too late, that I did not know.
There were about twenty people across the road at a neighbour's gathering — a birthday, with a table out on the lawn — and every one of them turned, because he did not lower his voice and because he had not expected to need to.
And he got hold of my wrist — because I had gone at the knees and he saw it coming from about a foot away — and he said:
Sir. You and Maribeth were never legally married.
Nobody moved.
Somebody across the road put a glass down on a table and I heard it, which tells you exactly how quiet that street had gone in about two seconds.
Four of those people have known us since 1978. One of them was at that sixtieth birthday with a cake in her hands.
He did not let go. He leaned in and said: you need to sit down.
I could not answer him. I had nothing at all. A man of eighty-six standing in his own doorway with his mouth open.
Sixty years.
Three children. Five grandchildren. Two house moves, one war, four jobs between us, a dog.
A whole life. All of it. Every ordinary day of it.
And a stranger standing on my step saying the woman I had called my wife for six decades had never legally been my wife at all.
I took the envelope out of his hand.
My name was on the front in her handwriting. Just my name, nothing else, in the hand I have been reading since 1963.
And that somehow made it worse than anything that man had said to me, because it meant she had sat somewhere and written it.
I opened it there in the doorway and I started reading.
I did not sit down. He asked me to twice and I did not.
Four pages, both sides, in that handwriting, written in — he told me later — the February, which means she carried it finished in a drawer for eight months.
And that man stood on my step for forty minutes while I read it, in the cold, without once suggesting that he should go or that we might do this another time.
PART 4
That licence was never filed.
And it was not her who failed to file it.
It was the county clerk.
In the August of 1965, in a building that is still standing and that I drove past about four thousand times without one thought in my head.
Because one of the two of us was not permitted to marry in that state that year.
I am not going to spell out more than that.
The law was what it was. The state was what it was. It changed two years later and everybody agreed afterwards that it had always been wrong.
