My Wife Mourned Me On Television — She Had No Idea I Was Watching Her Do It

Part 2

I sat in Dan’s pickup truck on the side of a service road behind the airport.

I was drinking bitter coffee from a gas station styrofoam cup.

We watched emergency vehicles tear past with their bright lights flashing.

Dan had a police scanner running low under the quiet radio.

We were both listening to the same words come through in clipped professional voices.

Private plane lost contact fourteen miles southeast of the coast.

Dan didn’t say a single word to me.

He just kept driving with his hands at ten and two.

He gripped the wheel like a man who had been taught that way fifty years ago and never saw a reason to update the technique.

I stared blankly at the dashboard.

The cheap plastic was deeply cracked.

There was a sticky coffee ring on it that had probably been there since the previous administration.

I thought about the soft leather interior of my own car.

I thought about the wife who had ordered that specific leather.

I thought about the way she had insisted on butterscotch instead of black because it made the cabin feel warmer.

She is going to call any minute now, I finally said.

I know, Dan replied softly.

What on earth do I say to her?

Dan pulled into the empty parking lot of a diner just over the state line.

He killed the engine and turned to look at me for the first time since picking me up.

You don’t say anything at all, he told me.

You don’t pick up the phone.

You let her find out from the breaking news exactly the way she planned to.

You watch exactly what she does in the next six hours.

Because what she does next is going to tell you everything you need to know about whether this was her idea or whether somebody else talked her into it.

And that matters for court, for your kids, and most importantly for you.

I nodded slowly in the quiet truck.

I didn’t trust my own voice to speak again.

My phone was face down on my thigh.

It had been buzzing on and off for twenty solid minutes.

I hadn’t looked at the screen once.

I couldn’t decide if that was incredible strength or sheer cowardice.

Inside the diner, Dan ordered us both eggs and bacon and strong coffee.

I looked at the menu and realized I simply couldn’t read it.

The letters were there on the page.

My eyes were working perfectly fine.

But something between my eyes and my brain had completely stopped processing information.

I had read the word omelette four times before I actually understood what it meant.

This is what deep shock looks like in a man who has never been allowed to have any.

It looks like a sixty-one-year-old in a custom suit sitting in a vinyl booth that has duct tape on the seam.

It looks like a wealthy industrialist completely unable to read a laminated diner menu.

Dan ordered for me and told me to eat slowly.

He warned me I was going to throw up if I ate too fast.

I put my fork down on the table.

I looked out the dirty window at a world that thought I was completely gone.

What would you do if the only way to find out who you really were was to let your wife bury you?