Forever, Interrupted(50)
Susan tells me stories about Ben as a child, about embarrassing things he did, tricks he tried to play. She tells me how he would always ask to wear her jewelry.
The visual of Ben in women’s jewelry immediately cracks me up.
She drinks her tea and smiles. “You have no idea! He used to always want to dress up as a witch for Halloween. I would explain to him that he could be a wizard, but he wanted to be a witch. I think he just wanted to paint his face green.”
We talk about Steven and how hard it was for her to lose him, how much of Steven she used to see in Ben, how she feels like maybe she suffocated Ben, trying too hard to hold on to him because Steven was gone.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “At least, from my point of view, Ben really loved you. He worried about you. He cared about you. We talked about you a lot. He . . . ” I don’t know how much I should tell her about Ben’s intentions and worries, about why he never told her about me. But it feels so good to talk to someone that knew him as well as I did, that knew him better than I did. It feels good to have someone say, “I know how much it hurts,” and believe them. It all just rolls off my tongue and into the air faster than I can catch it.
“He was scared that if you knew that he was with someone, in a serious relationship, that you would feel left out, maybe. Not left out, but . . . like he was moving on and there wasn’t a place for you. Which wasn’t true. He would always have a place for you. But he thought that if you heard about me, that you’d feel that way and he didn’t want that. He kept putting it off. Waiting for the right time. And then the right time never came and things with us progressed to the point where it was weird he hadn’t told you already, which made him feel bad. And then it just became this big thing that he wasn’t sure how to handle. He loved you, Susan. He really, really did. And he didn’t tell you about me because he was thinking of you, however misguided. I’m not going to say I totally understood it. Or that I liked it. But he didn’t keep it from you because you didn’t matter. Or because I didn’t matter. He just, he was a guy, you know? He didn’t know how to handle the situation gracefully so he didn’t handle it at all.”
She thinks about it for a minute, looking down at her plate. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you for telling me that. That’s not what I thought happened . . . It’s not necessarily good news, but it’s not entirely bad, right?” She is unsure of herself, and it’s clear that she is grappling with this. She’s trying very hard to be the Susan I’m seeing, but my guess is, she’s not quite there yet. “Are we at a place where I can make a gentle suggestion?” she says. “From one widow to another?”
“Oh. Uh . . . sure.”
“I poked,” she says. “In my defense, you did say it was okay, but really, I’m just nosy. I’ve always been nosy. I can’t stop myself. I tried to work on it for years, and then I just gave up around fifty. I just resigned myself to it: I am nosy. Anyway, I poked. Everything of Ben’s is still in its place. You haven’t moved a thing. I looked in the kitchen. You have food rotting in the fridge.”
I know where this is going and I wish I’d told her she could not make a gentle suggestion.
“I’d like to help you clear some things out. Make the place yours again.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to make it mine, it’s ours. It was ours. He . . . ”
She puts her hand up. “Okay. I’m dropping it. It’s your place to do with what you want. I just know, for me, I waited too long to move Steven’s things into storage and I regret that. I was living in this . . . shrine to him. I didn’t want to move his little box of floss because I thought it meant I was giving up on him—which I realize sounds crazy.”
“No, that doesn’t sound crazy.”
She looks me in the eye, knowing that I am doing the same thing, knowing that I am just as lost as she was. I want to convey to her that I like where I am in this. I don’t want to move forward.
“It is crazy, Elsie,” she says. It is pointed but kind. “Steven is alive in my heart and nowhere else. And when I moved his things out of my eyesight, I could live my life for me again. But you do what you want. You’re on no one’s timetable but your own.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Just remember that if you wade too long in the misery of it, you’ll wake up one day and find that your entire life is built around a ghost. That’s it. I’m off my soapbox. I’m in no place to tell you your business. I just feel like I know you. Although, I realize I don’t.”
“No.” I stop her. “I think you do.”
After lunch, Susan drops me off at my apartment and kisses me on the cheek. Before I jump out of her car and make my way up my own steps, she says to me, “If you ever need anything at all, please don’t hesitate.” She laughs in a sad way, as if it’s funny how pathetic what she is about to say truly is. “You’re the only person I have left to be there for,” she says.
I unlock my door and settle in, staring at Ben’s wedding ring on the counter. I think about what Susan said. We were or are, technically, family. What happens to the relationship you never had with your mother-in-law when your husband dies?
I sit down, holding Ben’s wallet in my hands, rubbing the worn edges. I take off my wedding ring, put his around my ring finger, and slide mine back on to hold it in place. His doesn’t fit. It’s a thick band many sizes too large, but it feels good on my finger.