“She says you told her to stay in there until the ceremony was over.”
“She’s nine and she was upset.
I said stay here for a bit.
Chris, kids hear—”
“She says you told her it would make people uncomfortable to see Rebecca’s daughter standing up here with me.”
And there — right there — was the first thing.
Pamela did not say I never said that.
She said: “That is not what I said.”
I have interviewed a great many people in twenty years.
There is a difference between those two sentences and it is not subtle.
“Then what did you say?”
“Chris, we are three minutes—”
“What did you say?”
Her jaw moved.
Down on the lawn, sixty-one people were sitting in white chairs listening to Pachelbel.
“I said,” she said, in a much lower voice, “that today was about us.
That’s all I said.
And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing for a woman to want on her wedding day, and I don’t think it’s cruel, and I would appreciate it if you would stop looking at me like I’m a defendant.”
“She’s the junior bridesmaid.
She’s in the program.
She has a job.”
“And I have watched that child hold your entire life hostage for two years!”
It came out fast and much too loud, and both of us heard how loud it was, and she stopped.
The quartet kept playing.
“Say the rest of it,” I said.
“Chris—”
“No.
You’ve started.
Say the rest of it, because I would rather hear it now than in four years.”
And Pamela Gable, who had held herself together beautifully for two years and for the previous ninety seconds, looked at me and let go.
“You want the rest of it?
Fine.
Every room in that house has her in it.
Every single room.
There are four photographs of your dead wife in the living room and one in the hall and one on the refrigerator and one in your daughter’s room and one in yours, Christopher, on the dresser, on your side.
“Every argument we have ever had, I have had with a woman who isn’t there, and I lose every time, because how do you win against somebody who never gets old and never leaves dishes in the sink and never says the wrong thing?
“And that child watches me.
She watches every single thing I do in that house and she reports on it to you with her face.
And I have spent two years trying — trying, Chris — to be pleasant and patient and understanding, and I am about to sign up for forty more years of coming second to a memory and third to a nine-year-old, and I wanted one afternoon. One.
Where I was the only person in the photographs.”
She stopped.
Somewhere behind her the piece ended and there was that particular silence that happens before a processional.
“That’s what I said to her,” Pamela said, more quietly.
“Some version of that.
And I should not have said it to a child and I know that, and I’m sorry, and we can fix that.
But you asked.”
And I stood there and understood two things at once.
The first was that almost everything she had just said was true from where she was standing, and that a better man than me might have found a way to hear it eighteen months earlier, in a kitchen, before it had anywhere else to go.
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