The Way It Worked

The way it worked was, he was twenty-three years older than me, not yet divorced, with joint custody of his two kids. And two weeks after we met—two weeks of sex and stumbling around smiling—I was leaving for India. For six months or maybe eight.  

The way it worked was that late on Sunday afternoons, when it was morning at home, I would wait in a small room in my colleague’s house in Varanasi, and he would call and we would talk until the fear of the phone bill grew too menacing. (This was the way it worked in the days before ubiquitous cell phones and Skype and WhatsApp.) Some weeks the room wasn’t available, and I sat in a public call booth on a jute bag stuffed with hay, listening to his now familiar voice, and sometimes I think I might be making up the hay part. But I remember the smell of it and the itch of the fibers in my nose, so I think I’m probably not.  

The way it worked was that seven months later, I came home, and although we had emailed daily in addition to the expensive weekly phone calls, we did not know each other in many fundamental ways and had to meet each other all over again. The way it worked was that he was still twenty-three years older and still not divorced and still had joint custody of his teenage daughters, one of whom hated me on sight. The way it worked was that despite all of the above, I would have moved in with him, but he wasn’t ready to move in with me, and given the speed of everything, I couldn’t really argue.  

The way it worked was that the years passed. He did, in fact, get divorced. I bought a house. The daughters became adults. We adopted four cats: three friendly black brothers and, later, one tortoiseshell, standoffish and impossibly fluffy. The way it worked was that we built a two-household, four-cat life, strong enough to last for seventeen years.  

The way it worked was that by then he wanted to share a house. I wanted it less, accustomed as I was to my house and my cats and a few nights a week with him. But also, the way it worked was that I did a lot of the work of the two-household relationship. I brought leftovers to work to leave in the office refrigerator so that when I stopped at his house after work, neither of us would have to cook. The way it worked was that this was not an area where he reciprocated, and even though I wasn’t pushing for him to move in, I could see how a change might improve my life too.  

The way it worked was that in the months before he was supposed to move in, things at my job got complicated, then terrible, then nearly unbearable. The way it worked was that he didn’t seem to be doing very well on the packing front and I was too busy to help him. The way it worked was that when I finally did help him, when he was already half moved into my house, I found the papers, hidden on a desk behind the (now enormous) fig tree I’d bought for ten dollars at the tropical plant sale at the Big Y back in 2005. The papers had been pulled out of a notebook, the paper smooth, the edges rough. The way it worked was that I wondered every day why he hadn’t burned them. There was a letter, a journal entry, in which I learned that eleven years earlier, he had had an affair. The way it worked was that I was too angry to even speak to him, let alone help him pack. The way it worked was that my therapist—clearly no stranger to stories of infidelity—asked, “Does the thing that happened eleven years ago outweigh everything that’s happened since?” The way it worked was that furious as I was, I had to say no, it didn’t. I let him finish moving the rest of his stuff in but made him sleep in the cottage with his cats for the first month. The way it worked was that even when I was still mad at him, it was quite nice to have someone else to build the fire and feed the cats and make the toast, but not the tea because the way it worked was that I was better at making the tea than he was, since he would forget to set the timer and also forget how long the tea had been brewing.  

The way it worked was that after he was all moved in and we were spending more time together than ever (much of it lovely), I started to realize exactly how much it was that he was forgetting. It turned out he was forgetting a lot. He was on his way to forgetting everything. The way it worked was that by the time I quit the job that had made me so miserable, I had another job waiting for me at home. The way it worked was I had to do all the remembering for both of us. The way it worked was that then there was a pandemic. The way it worked was that slowly, then quickly, he died. The way it worked was that over the next few years, one by one, all the black cats died too, old men all. The way it worked is that now our household is one house, one woman, one cat. She is seventeen and cranky and still impossibly fluffy.  

Sue Dickman is a writer in western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, The Millions, The Keepthings, and other publications. She is currently finishing a novel about, among other things, the impact of a dementia diagnosis on a complicated extended family. She received her MFA in fiction writing from the University of Oregon. Follow her on Instagram @sue_dickman.   

This essay is a Short Reads original.