At Age 72, I Married My High School Sweetheart. Two Weeks Following My Eviction By His Children, With Only My Burial Dress In Hand, His Lawyer Arrived At My Trailer And Told Me, “Your Husband Made Sure You Got EXACTLY What You Deserved.”

For two months, Desmond and I lived a kind of happiness I genuinely hadn’t expected to get a second chance at. He read the newspaper out loud to me in the mornings, complaining about things neither of us could change. I taught him, finally, fifty-three years too late, how to make my mother’s lemon bars properly, and he burned the first batch so badly the smoke detector went off twice.

In early August, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, Desmond had a heart attack while working in the garden and was gone before the ambulance made it halfway to Millbrook Falls General.

I had been married to him for exactly fifty-eight days.

PART 3

Louise arrived at the house before I’d even finished calling the rest of the family.