I was going to be late for work—almost an hour late—and the muffins were inedible by the time we returned to the kitchen and realized they’d been severely overcooked. I drove down the 405 still stunned at what I’d learned. Not only did Aunt Ruby know about the affairs—plural—she knew about the women: their names, where they lived, what they did for a living. It kind of creeped me out that she’d also kept mementos of each woman her husband had cheated with. I couldn’t imagine why she would want to do that, but maybe she just had to remember who her husband really was. He’d certainly put on a good show for the rest of us.
All the memories I had of her and Uncle Phillip raced through my mind as I tried to fit them into a new paradigm. I thought they were happy up until my dad stumbled across the affair. I thought they were in love to that point at least. Aunt Ruby, my domestic goddess of an aunt who’d doted on me, who always decorated for the holidays—my mom hated the clutter—who paid for the first year of my college education, and who gave me a high-end camera as a wedding gift so I could “treasure every memory” had been hiding a broken heart all those years.
Here we thought we were protecting her by not telling her what we knew, and perhaps in a way we were—knowing we knew was obviously painful for her—but she was much stronger than I had thought she was. She’d cared for a man she didn’t love because it was the right thing for her to do, and despite my modern feministic ways, I couldn’t disagree with her choice after hearing her defend it. She was raising her son at a different time. Who was I to say she’d made the wrong choice? My anger rose, however, when I thought of how Uncle Phillip was now standing in her way for something that could be beautiful.
“With all my love, G.”
She hadn’t had all of Uncle Phillip’s love. What if she could have all of Gabriel’s? What if Gabriel were the person she had expected Uncle Phillip to be? And yet seeing her pain laid out before me made it hard to imagine how she’d be able to overcome the betrayal of thirty years of marriage. I called Uncle Phillip some really ugly names during the last few minutes of my drive to work, then tried to think of how I could help Aunt Ruby see something more in Gabriel than she wanted to see—than she dared to trust. Then again, maybe this was something Aunt Ruby needed to do all on her own.
It was rotten how life played with us sometimes, giving us trials we couldn’t just overcome and make better. Ruby was facing that. Keisha was too. So was I. Would any of us find the right resolution? I hoped so.