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.”

I left in the dress I had, only two days earlier, quietly picked out to be buried in someday — dark blue, simple, the one thing hanging in my closet at the house that Louise, in her hurry to have me gone, never bothered to check whether it counted as mine or Desmond’s.

I moved into my late sister’s old trailer out along the county road, a single-wide she’d left me eight years ago that I’d never quite gotten around to selling. Desmond’s absence sat in that trailer with me every single hour, heavier than anything I’d carried in a long time, heavier even than losing Harold, because I hadn’t had fifty-eight days with Harold to still be counting.

Two weeks after Louise put my suitcase on that porch, I was outside hanging laundry on the line strung between two fence posts when I heard tires crunching gravel.

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